ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

IN  ACCOUNT  WITH 

RELIGION 


EDWARD  MORTIMER  CHAPMAN 


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THE  DYNAMIC  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 
A  Study  of  the  Vital  and  Permanent  Element 
in  the  Christian  Religion.     i2mo,  J1.25  n^i. 
Postage  12  cents. 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

BOSTON  AND   NEW  YORK 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE 
IN  ACCOUNT  WITH  RELIGION 


ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

IN  ACCOUNT  WITH 

RELIGION 

1800-1900 

BT 

EDWARD  MORTIMER  CHAPMAN 


BOSTON  Airo  NEW  TOEK 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

(ttie  Stibet^tie  pte^^  Cambniige 

1910 


COPYRIGHT,  T9IO,  BY  EDWARD  M.  CHAPMAN 


ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 


Published  March  iqio 


<Lt-< 


To 
R.  C. 

AND 

M.  G.  C. 


PREFACE 

Many  writers  of  late  years  have  undertaken  to  ex- 
pound the  ^  religion '  of  this  poet  or  to  define  the 
*  faith '  of  that  novelist.  I  have  no  charter  to  essay 
so  high  an  adventure ;  but  have  tried  rather  to  set 
forth  something  of  the  debt  which  Literature  owes 
to  Religion  for  its  subjects,  its  language,  its  antag- 
onisms and  inspirations,  as  well  as  in  many  cases 
for  the  training  of  its  writers ;  while  on  the  other 
hand  I  have  wished  to  suggest  the  debt  which  Re- 
ligion as  indisputably  owes  to  Literature  for  the 
extension  of  its  influence  and  the  humanizing  of 
its  ideals.  My  treatment  of  Religion  has  therefore 
been  very  broad  and  quite  as  really  objective  as 
subjective  —  to  use  a  pair  of  threadbare  adjectives 
which  have  been  denied  entrance  to  the  following 
chapters. 

Two  lectures  delivered  at  Yale  in  1906,  and  en- 
titled "  The  Influence  of  Religion  upon  English 
Literature  during  the  Nineteenth  Century,"  con- 
tained the  germ  of  this  book  and  were  indeed  a  sort 
of  prefatory  syllabus  ;  but  no  page  of  them  is  re- 
produced in  it.  Portions  of  the  Introduction  and  of 
Chapter  XIV  have  appeared  in  Reviews,  but  these 
also  have  been  recast. 

The  form  of  certain  words  upon  the  following 


21CG83 


▼iii  PREFACE 

pages  will  be  found  to  accord  itself  to  the  second- 
ary rather  than  to  the  primary  spelling  of  our  Amer- 
ican dictionaries.  Should  any  friend  committed  to 
^Spelling  Reform'  discover  this  and  be  'vext/  I 
shall  be,  so  far  forth,  sorry.  The  choice  of  these 
forms  has  not  been  made  in  mere  gratification  of  a 
whim  or  with  any  desire  to  seem  singular  ;  but  with 
a  very  strong  conviction  that  unless  the  freedom  to 
use  an  elder  spelling  be  sometimes  asserted  it  is 
likely  soon  to  be  denied.  I  say  an  elder  spelling, 
not  a  better,  because  in  determining  the  orthogra- 
phy of  many  of  these  words,  individual  taste  seems 
to  me  to  have,  within  due  limits,  a  perfect  right  to 
consideration.  Freedom  of  thought  and  a  more  or 
less  gracious  refusal  to  be  bound  by  the  dogmas  of 
mere  authority  have  ever  been  chief  characteristics 
of  vital  religion  and  of  enduring  literature.  Neither 
has  felt,  however,  at  least  for  very  long,  that  in 
order  to  serve  to-morrow  it  was  necessary  to  con- 
temn yesterday. 

So  much  time  and  pains  have  gone  to  the  verifi- 
cation of  quotation,  reference,  and  allusion  that  I 
venture  to  hope  —  rather  against  hope,  to  be  sure 
—  that  they  may  be  found  free  from  errors  grave 
enough  to  mislead  the  reader  or  to  embarrass  the 
writer. 

Since  some  of  the  later  chapters  were  written 
Death  has  been  urgent  with  many  eminent  and  well- 
beloved  names  in  them ;  and  Meredith,  Swinburne, 
Francis  Thompson,  and  John  Davidson  in  England, 


PREFACE  ix 

with  Sarah  Orne  Jewett,  R.  W.  GUder,  and  T.  T. 
Munger  in  America,  must  be  added  to  his  roll. 
Though  dead  they  yet  speak  with  Hving  voice,  how- 
ever, and  I  have  not,  in  general,  felt  obhged  to 
change  my  mode  of  reference  to  them. 

E.  M.  C. 

Old  Lyme,  Connecticut, 
25  January  t  1910. 


CONTENTS 


I.  Religion  and  Litebatube.  Inteoddction    •    .      1 

II.  The  Dawn  of  the  New  Day 30 

CJowper — Crabbe  —  Bums  —  Blake. 

III.  Sons  of  the  Morning 61 

Wordsworth  and  Coleri<^e. 

IV.  The  Apostles  of  Revolt 91 

Byron  and  Shelley. 

V.  The  "  Edinburgh  *'  and  the  **  Quarterly  "    .  127 

The  Reviewers  of  the  "  Edinburgh,"  "  Quarterly,"  "  Black- 
wood's," and  "  Cockney  "  groups. 

VI.   Clapham  and  Oxford 161 

Evangelical  and  Tractarian  —  The  Clapham  Sect  — Thorn- 
ton —  Wilberf orce  —  Milner  —  Venn  —  Lord  Teignmouth 

—  Henry  Martyn  —  Zachary  Macaulay  —  James  Stephen 
and  his  Family  — The  Trevelyans  —  Keble  —  Newman  — 
Tractarian  Literature. 

VII.  Eluah  and  Elisha 199 

Carlyle  and  Ruskin. 

VIII.  The  Masters  of  Fiction.  I 236 

Dependence  of  Humour  upon  Faith — Maria  Edgeworth  — 
Jane  Austen  —  Scott  —  Cooper  —  Marryat  —  Poe  —  The 
Brontes  —  Hawthorne. 

IX.  The  Masters  of  Fiction.  II       272 

Dickens  —  Thackeray  —  Bulwer-Lytton  —  Mrs.  Gaskell 

—  The  Kingsleys  —  Charles  Reade  —  Trollope  —  Gteorge 
Eliot. 


zii  CONTENTS 

X.  The  New  Radicalism 311 

Priestley  —  Godwin  —  Bentham  —  James  Mill  —  John  Stuart 
Mill— Cobbett— Elliott— Cooper— Mazzini— The  Broad 
Churchmen — Maurice  —  Horace  Bushnell  —  Martineau  — 
Emerson  —  The  New  England  Poetg. 

XI.  The  Great  Twin  Brethren 349 

Tennyson  and  Browning. 

'XII.  Darwin  and  his  Ploughshare 394 

Romanes  and  his  Experience  —  Charles  Darwin  —  Huxley 
and  the  Agnostics  —  Agassiz  —  Gray  —  Le  Conte  —  Fiske 

—  Drummond. 

XIII.  The  Doubters  and  the  Mystics 423 

Songs  of  Doubt  and  Disillusion  generally  sung  by  Young 
Men  —  Clough — Matthew  Arnold — The  Relation  between 
Doubter  and  Mystic  —  The  True  Mystic  —  Christina  Ros- 
setti  —  D.  G.  Rossetti— William  Morris  —  Edward  Fitz- 
Gerald. 

XIV.  The  Heyday  of  Minor  Poetry 460 

A  Dubious  Title  introduced  by  Two  Great  Names  —  George 
Meredith  —  Swinburne  —  James  Thomson  and  *'  The 
City  of  Dreadful  Night"  — John  Davidson —  "  Bard 
of  the  Dimbo-Vitza  "  —  Henley  —  W.  V.  Moody  —  Rolle- 
ston  —  Austin  Dobson  —  Mrs.  Meynall  —  C.  G.  D.  Rob- 
erts —  Francis  Thompson  —  Walt  Whitman  —  William 
Watson  —  Stephen  Phillips  —  T.  E.  Brown  —  Stevenson 

—  Kipling. 

XV.  The  Newer  Fiction.  I 495 

The  Reaction  of  Philosophy  upon  the  Historian  —  Upon  the 
Novelist  —  Possible  Unreality  of  Realism  —  The  '  Reli- 
gious '  Novel  —  Sunday  School  Books  —  The  Novel  of 
Religion  and  Manners  —  The  Novel  of  Manners  —  The 
*  Early  Christian '  Novel — The  Theological  Novel — George 
Maedonald —  "  Robert  Elsmere  "  —  "  Ships  that  Pass  in 
the  Night "  —  "  The  Story  of  an  African  Farm  "  —  "  Mark 
Rutherford"  —  The  'Social  Problem'  Novel  —  George 
Gissing. 

XVI.   The  Newer  Fiction.    II 533 

The  Novel  of  Life  as  touched  by  Faith  or  Doubt  —  Mere- 
dith —  Stevenson  —  Kipling  —  Thomas  Hardy  —  Eden 
Phillpotts  —  Conclusion. 

Index 563 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE 
IN  ACCOUNT  WITH  RELIGION 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE 
IN  ACCOUNT  WITH  RELIGION 

CHAPTER  I 

BELIGION  AND  LITERATURE 

Mazzini,  upon  being  asked  what  he  would  have 
taught  in  school,  is  said  to  have  replied  :  "  Some 
knowledge  of  Astronomy.  A  man  learns  nothing  if 
he  has  n't  learned  to  wonder,  and  Astronomy  better 
than  any  science  teaches  him  something  of  the 
mystery  and  grandeur  of  the  universe."  ^ 

He  spoke  with  the  insight  and  the  exaggeration 
of  genius.  As  a  suggestion  his  dictum  is  profoundly 
true ;  and  its  truth  is  as  significant  for  criticism  as 
for  education.  Great  literature  takes  account  of  the 
Universe  with  its  mystery  and  grandeur;  not  of 
course  in  any  pedantic  or  grandiloquent  fashion, 
but  with  an  implicit  realization  of  it.  The  genuine 
poet  or  creative  novelist  always  writes  with  a  keen 
sense  of  the  interrelation  of  events.  To  say  this  is 
in  no  sense  to  imply  that  literature  is  usually  the 
product  of  a  bland  and  contented  acceptance  of  the 
scheme  of   things;    great  literature  almost  never 

*  Letters  of  J.  R.  Greeny  Leslie  Stephen,  editor,  p.  326. 


2  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

springs  of  such  lineage,  but  it  none  the  less  relates 
itself  vitally  to  the  scheme  of  things ;  it  may  be  by 
way  of  acceptance  and  illustration  ;  it  may  be  by  way 
of  refusal  and  revolt ;  it  may  be  even  more  often  by 
way  of  quest  and  search  and  wonder.  A  small  man 
is  prone  to  be  effusive  in  emphasizing  his  acceptance 
and  professing  his  allegiance.  The  sense  of  the  uni- 
versal finds  quick  and  cheap  utterance  at  his  lips. 
The  great  man  is  less  easily  moved  to  confession  of 
the  faith  which  animates  him  because  of  its  very 
greatness  and  his  sense  of  the  world's  inevitableness 
and  mystery.  "  I  accept  the  Universe,"  cried  Mar- 
garet Fuller  in  a  moment  of  ecstasy.  They  told 
Carlyle.  "  Gad  ! "  growled  he,  with  characteristic 
grimness;  ^^Gad!  she'd  better." 

In  all  this  the  path  of  literature  lies  parallel  to 
that  of  religion.  They  are  old  and  dear  companions 
—  brethren  indeed  of  one  blood  ;  not  always  agree- 
ing, to  be  sure  ;  squabbling  rather  in  true  brotherly 
fashion  now  and  then;  occasionally  falling  out 
very  seriously  and  bitterly ;  but  still  interdependent 
and  necessary  to  each  other.  It  is  my  purpose  in 
the  following  chapters  to  illustrate  this  interrelation 
from  the  literary  history  of  the  last  century.  This 
seems  worth  doing  for  several  reasons :  in  the  first 
place  the  period  covered  by  our  proposed  study  was 
in  a  very  notable  degree  a  period  of  unrest  and 
transition  in  religious  thought.  The  third  and  per- 
haps most  characteristic  quarter  of  the  century 
might  properly  be  designated,  indeed,  as  a  time  of 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  3 

theological  revolution.  The  foundations  of  faith 
were  shaken.  Sober-minded  men  to  whom  the  past 
was  sacred,  the  long-established  institutions  of  the 
present  dear,  and  who  felt  an  unselfish  responsibility 
for  the  future,  looked  out  upon  a  scene  which  gave 
them  grave  concern.  Even  some  champions  of  the 
new  order  of  things  in  the  realm  of  thought,  grew 
serious  as  they  contemplated  the  possible  extent  of 
their  own  influence.  They  were  by  no  means  men  of 
destructive  habit  or  ambition ;  but  it  seemed  for  a 
time  during  those  five  and  twenty  years  as  though 
the  negative  result  of  their  work  might  prove  to  be 
so  mordant  and  far-reaching  as  to  preclude  the 
chance  of  reconstruction  in  the  realms  of  ethics 
and  religion.  The  last  quarter  of  a  century  was 
characterized  by  a  temper  somewhat  less  truculent 
on  the  one  side  and  less  anxious  on  the  other. 
Neither  the  priests  of  ^  natural '  science  nor  those 
of  ^  revealed  '  religion  were  quite  so  much  inclined 
to  dogmatism  in  their  mutual  affirmations  and  de- 
nials. Thus,  by  the  year  of  grace  1900,  it  had  be- 
come pretty  evident  that  religion's  lease  of  life  was 
to  be  a  longer  one  than  the  secularist  of  1875  had 
been  disposed  to  admit. 

This  general  agreement  that  religion  is  likely  to 
prove  a  permanent  concern  of  mankind  constitutes 
a  second  reason  for  undertaking  such  a  study  as  I 
propose.  Instead  of  attempting  to  explain  religion 
away,  the  scientific  spirit  of  to-day  would  seem  to 
require  that  we  observe  it,  that  we  make  record  of 


4  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

its  experience,  that  we  account  for  it  at  least  to  the 
extent  of  tracing  its  secondary  causes,  and  that  we 
make  some  attempt  to  determine  its  probable  course 
in  the  future. 

It  is  to  be  noted,  furthermore,  that  a  study  of 
the  religious  import  of  English  literature  during 
this  extraordinary  transition  century  is  likely  to 
prove  of  especial  significance.  In  the  first  place  the 
range  and  wealth  of  this  literature  have  been  enor- 
mous —  greater  probably  than  those  of  any  other 
period  in  any  language ;  though  the  Elizabethan 
age  may  have  surpassed  it  in  the  intrinsic  worth  of 
its  relatively  restricted  product,  and  Goethe's  mar- 
vellously long  day  suf&ced  for  a  work  by  himself  and 
his  contemporaries  of  two  generations  comparable 
to  it.  In  the  second  place,  this  English  literature 
has  been  a  literature  of  the  people  in  a  new  and 
significant  measure.  It  has  appealed  to  a  public 
numerically  greater  than  any  other  literature  has 
known ;  and  that  public  has  been  avid  and  acquisi- 
tive of  knowledge  in  a  unique  degree.  A  very  large 
and  appreciative  section  of  this  public,  distinctly 
the  most  alert  and  plastic  portion  of  it,  has  spent 
the  century  in  one  of  the  noblest  of  human  adven- 
tures—  the  building  of  a  nation.  It  has  conquered 
a  wilderness ;  founded  and  brought  to  maturity 
commonwealths  of  vast  extent,  population,  and 
wealth ;  fought  the  greatest  of  civil  wars  for  the 
sake  of  an  idea,  and  survived  the  conflict  because 
of  that  idea's  vital  force ;  devoted  itself  with  un- 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  5 

precedented  effectiveness  to  the  development  of  the 
natural  resources  of  a  peculiarly  endowed  country  ; 
and,  with  it  all,  striven,  as  no  people  ever  strove  be- 
fore, so  to  organize  its  experience  and  knowledge  as 
to  make  them  available  for  its  children  by  a  system 
of  free  public  education.  It  was  inevitable  that  this 
effort  should  often  be  as  crude  as  it  was  honest  and 
eager,  but  none  the  less  it  has  succeeded  in  making 
a  multitude  of  keen  and  facile  minds  amenable  to 
the  influences  of  literature.  One  would  go  too  far 
in  claiming  that  the  public-school  system  of  America 
has  acquainted  its  pupils  with  literature;  and  of 
course  it  has  not  bred  a  literature.  Its  failure  in 
these  respects  for  several  generations  was  probably 
unavoidable.  The  Day's  Work  has  generally  been 
too  ready,  near,  and  appeaHng  to  the  young  Ameri- 
can to  permit  his  mind  to  turn  in  upon  itself.  He 
quickly  forms  the  busy  habit,  and  literature  is  jeal- 
ous of  preoccupation  by  so-called  practical  matters. 
A  thoughtful  observer  is  the  more  reconciled  to 
this  condition  of  affairs,  however,  as  he  remembers 
the  shallow  and  silly  cry  which  has  arisen  from  time 
to  time  in  America  for  a  distinctively  national  lit- 
erature. Attempts  have  been  made  —  once  or  twice, 
I  believe,  by  teachers  in  universities  —  to  indicate 
the  characteristics  which  should  differentiate  the 
American  from  the  English  literary  product,  as 
though  the  spirit  of  Truth  could  become  the  crea- 
ture of  custom-house,  tariff,  and  provincial  preju- 
dice. America  can  afford  to  wait  and  learn  until 


I 


6  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  brief  day  of  such  treason  to  her  own  past  is 
over  —  a  past  which  gives  her  part  and  lot  in  every 
century  of  English  literature  save  one,  and  waits 
to  give  her  an  abundant  share  in  that  if  she  will 
claim  it.  Nineteenth-century  literature  was  unique 
in  its  privilege  of  immediate  appeal  to  a  world-wide 
public,  without  necessity  of  suffering  any  sea-change 
or  paying  tribute  of  translation  at  any  boundary. 
Britain  has  naturally  been  the  great  contributor  to 
its  volume,  but  she  has  neither  claimed  nor  wished 
to  claim  any  exclusive  sovereignty  over  sound  Eng- 
lish speech.  The  worth  of  Emerson,  Poe,  and  Whit- 
man has  been  as  generously  appraised  in  England 
as  in  America ;  while  Carlyle,  Ruskin,  and  Brown- 
ing have  found  as  quick  response  here  as  at  home. 
It  is  therefore  scarcely  necessary  to  say  that  in  the 
chapters  which  follow  I  shall  consider  English  lit- 
erature as  connoting  the  product  of  a  great  language 
and  a  great  religious,  social,  and  political  experience, 
common  in  its  essence  to  the  whole  Anglo-Ameri- 
can race.  "  Cursed  be  he  that  removeth  his  neigh- 
bour's landmark,"  saith  the  Deuteronomist.  Thrice 
cursed  let  him  be  who  would  reenact  Babel,  and 
introduce  schism  into  his  mother-tongue. 

An  exercise  in  definition  is  no  part  of  my  present 
purpose,  but  it  is  necessary  here  to  indicate  the 
scope  and  range  which  will  be  permitted  to  some 
words  of  frequent  occurrence  in  our  inquiry.  The 
etymology  of  ^religion'  still  eludes  us.  Cicero 
preferred  the  derivation  from  relegere,  to  read  over 


/ 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE 


again,  as  children  might  con  a  lesson.*  Modern 
scholars  like  better  to  connect  the  word  with  reli- 
gare,  to  bind,  in  the  effort  to  find  a  definition  and 
a  sanction.  Religion  is  that  bond  which  connects 
our  lives  with  God,  and  lays  the  sense  of  obligation^ 
upon  us.  ^11  great  words  of  this  sort  are  certain 
to  increase  and  enrich  their  content  as  human 
experience  pays  tribute  to  them ;  and  '  religion ' 
is  a  notable  example  of  such  growth.  Upon  the"/ 
one  side  it  looks  toward  conduct ;  upon  another  ) 
toward  observance  or  worship.  Within,  its  office^ 
is  to  search  the  heart,  that  it  may  remain  contrite 
and  humble,  and  at  the  same  time  to  uplift  and 
cheer  it  by  assurance  of  life's  kinship  with  the  di- 
vine. Thus,  as  the  thought  and  life  of  last  century 
developed,  *  reHgion '  in  an  increasing  degree  came 
to  signify  that  faith  or  experience  which  should 
suf&ce  to  make  life  coherent  and  harmonious.  Re- 
ligion not  only  links  man  to  God ;  it  binds  the  in- 
cidents of  his  experience  into  a  vital  whole  —  a  true 
"  bundle  of  life,"  to  use  the  quaint  Scripture  phrase. 
While  taking  account  of  all  the  phenomena  of  the 
inward  realm  of  thouo:ht  and  the  outward  realm  of 
conduct,  it  insists  upon  the  possibiHty  and  the  worth 
of  a  true  consistency. 

Religion  is  the  enemy  of  all  discord  except  such 
temporary  unrest  as  the  ploughshare  causes  in  its 
preparation  of  the  encrusted  and  fallow  field  for 
fruitful n ess.    It  convicts  of  sin  without  troubling 

1^  Cf.  New  English  Dictionary  (Murray's). 


8  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

itself  overmuch  about  definitions  of  sin.  With  a 
singular  persistence  it  holds  a  mirror  up  to  man's 
nature,  in  which  he  cannot  help  but  see  the  things 
that  mar  his  individual  and  social  peace.  While  en- 
gaged in  such  duty,  Eeligion's  ears  know  very  well 
the  old  cry  of  man's  demoniac  seizures :  "  What 
have  we  to  do  with  thee  " ;  yet  she  is  not  disheart- 
ened. Quite  as  well  she  knows  the  obduracies  and 
obstinacies  behind  which  men  hide  themselves ;  the 
superstitions  which  creep  in  at  the  window  when 
she  is  banished  from  the  door ;  all  the  infelicity, 
pettiness,  and  hypocrisy  which  mar  life's  wholeness. 
She  has  reason  for  discouragement  in  view  of  the 
sad  imperfection  of  her  best  human  instruments; 
yet  with  divine  humility  she  still  works  cheerfully 
with  obdurate  materials.  Her  worst  enemies  are  too 
often  those  of  her  own  household;  yet  she  outlives 
their  misrepresentations.  She  speaks  many  lan- 
guages ;  visualizes  herself  in  many  forms ;  by  a  mys- 
terious alchemy  transmutes  base  metal  into  gold; 
feeds  upon  persecution ;  makes  allies  of  those  who 
threaten  the  sources  of  her  very  existence,  and  so 
endures  with  something  of  the  power  of  an  endless 
life.  Like  the  Psalmist  she  is  a  wonder  unto  many ; 
a  reproach  to  some,  an  object  of  wistful  but  hope- 
less desire  to  others,  a  joy  to  such  as  heed  her  mes- 
sage ;  at  least  these  so  report,  and  with  such  per- 
sistence and  conviction  as  to  make  it  worth  while 
to  inquire  a  little  more  closely  into  the  basis  of 
their  confidence. 


/ 

RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  9 

When  we  ask  for  a  succinct  statement  of  this 
message  of  wholeness  and  peace,  our  ears  may  well 
be  deafened  by  the  multitude,  volume,  and  seeming 
conflict  of  the  replies.  The  chorus  of  believers  is  ill 
trained  in  concerted  effort.  Yet  some  things  sound 
reasonably  clear  and  intelligible. 

Keligion  believes  in  and  proclaims  the  Universe. 
All  her  life  is  based  upon  faith  in  cosmos  rather 
ihan  chaos.  There  is  a  scheme  and  plan  in  Man 
and  Nature,  so  that  the  two  belong  to  each  other ; 
and  though  this  plan  transcends  a  man's  ability  to 
grasp  and  subdue  it  to  his  purposes,  because  it  is 
so  great,  it  is  still  cognate  to  his  mind ;  it  is  amen- 
able to  expression  in  terms  of  thought,  so  far  as 
experience  can  compass  it.  Phenomena  do  not  put 
us  to  permanent  confusion.  They  mystify  us  often 
enough,  but  it  is  with  a  challenge  tot)ur  curiosity 
and  spirit  of  adventure  rather  than  with  a  tyran- 
nous and  insane  denial.  All  our  experience  leads 
us  to  live  upon  the  hypothesis  that  there  is  a  reason 
and  a  cause  for  every  event — a  cause  which  may 
conceivably  be  made  manifest,  and,  if  manifested, 
will  prove  to  be  in  harmony  with  the  scheme  of 
causation  underlying  other  phenomena. 

This  is  Keligion's  way  of  saying  that  the  Uni- 
verse has  a  Soul ;  and  that  at  the  source  of  things 
there  dwells  a  Vital  Force,  of  such  nature  that  all 
its  outflowings  and  ongoings  belong  together,  even 
when  men  are  unable  to  perceive  their  relation. 
Yet  the  fact  that  man  can  perceive  so  much  coher- 


10  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ence,  and  that,  as  he  pursues  his  research  into  the 
world  without  and  his  own  heart  within,  the  field 
of  intelligibility  constantly  grows,  is  a  matter  of 
prime  significance  to  him.  It  means  nothing  less 
than  that  this  Cosmic  Power  is  mirrored  in  his  own 
soul.  He  discovers  that  the  little  world  of  his  per- 
sonal experience  is  cognate  to  the  great  world  of 
universal  experience,  and  that  while  he  is  in  one 
sense  the  product  of  Nature,  he  is  in  another  the 
reader  of  her  secrets,  and  fitted  to  be  the  master  of 
her  forces.  Quite  naturally  he  reaches  the  conclu- 
sion that  the  attributes  of  Mind  and  Will  belono^  to 
this  Vital  Force,  which  operates  in  a  fashion  so 
orderly  and  so  coherent  as  to  be  intelligible  when 
he  can  isolate  a  portion  of  its  workings,  and  which 
is  mysterious  as  to  the  rest  only  because  the  multi- 
tude of  phenomena  is  so  vast  and  intricate. 

A  necessary  consequence  follows.  Man  cannot 
treat  such  a  conclusion  as  this,  to  which  the  experi- 
ence of  the  race,  the  appeal  of  his  own  heart,  and 
the  trend  of  his  thinking  lead  him,  as  a  mere  curi- 
ous phenomenon,  to  be  acknowledged — and  ne- 
glected. He  is  impelled  by  a  sort  of  instinctive 
honour  to  admit  that  a  force  which  vitalizes  the  Uni- 
verse after  such  a  fashion  as  to  imply  the  presence 
and  activity  of  mind  and  will  must  be  a  Person  as  he 
understands  the  term.  Man  names  him  —  God.  It 
is  a  word  which,  like  every  personal  name,  transcends 
definition;  all  names  of  persons  being,  indeed,  but 
counters  or  symbols  which  stand  for  experience, 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  11 

meaning  much  or  little  according  as  personal  rela- 
tions have  been  intimate  or  remote.  The  meaninor 

o 

of  no  name  can  be  adequately  communicated  by 
hearsay. 

Religion  takes  up  this  experience  of  man,  seek- 
ing, finding,  and  following  God,  as  the  Spirit  of 
power  and  truth,  who  vitalizes  the  Universe,  and 
describes  the  relation  in  one  pregnant  phrase  :  "  And 
God  created  man  in  his  own  image;  in  the  image 
of  God  created  He  him."  Out  of  the  same  Hebrew 
tradition  she  chooses  another  phrase  to  characterize 
man's  history  and  the  promise  of  his  future  :  "And 
God  said,  Be  fruitful,  and  multiply,  and  replenish 
the  earth  and  subdue  it."  The  fact  that  such  a  word 
is  of  uncertain  date  and  dubious  authorship  in  no 
sense  invalidates  its  worth  ;  because  since  the  begin- 
ning, man's  adventure  in  the  earth  has  been  pre- 
cisely that  which  Genesis  outlines  —  the  struggle 
for  his  own  life,  for  the  life  of  his  offspring,  for  a 
subjugation  of  the  earth's  material  resource,  and 
for  an  ultimate  mastery  of  circumstance.  Man  re- 
mains the  one  indomitable  creature.  This  man  or 
that  may  seem  to  go  down  before  hostile  chance ; 
but  Man  refuses  to  be  permanently  subjugated. 
The  elemental  forces  of  Nature  terrify  him  tempo- 
rarily, and  occasionally  overwhelm  a  multitude  of 
individuals.  But  Man  is  of  such  a  sort  that  ulti- 
mately they  must  serve  him.  The  constellations 
wheeling  in  their  orbits  represent  an  insoluble  mys- 
tery, in  one  aspect  of  it;  but  none  the  less  they  are 


12  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

harnessed  to  man's  watch-wheels  and  clock-weights. 
It  has  become  a  part  of  their  diurnal  task  to  tell 
him  the  time  or  to  reveal  his  position  in  mid-ocean ; 
the  very  ocean  itself^  meanwhile,  trackless  as  its 
waste  is,  and  ungovernable  as  its  fury  seems,  having 
been  subdued  into  his  chief  beast  of  burden. 

So  Keligion  is  always  calling  men  to  a  considera- 
tion of  the  greatness  of  their  life  upon  the  earth. 
She  speaks  of  sin  as  a  marring  of  man's  chance  — 
an  interruption  of  the  natural  relation  which  should 
exist  between  him  and  God.  She  treats  him  always 
as  though  he  were  endowed  with  a  will  to  choose, 
if  not  his  path,  at  least  the  direction  in  which  he 
would  fain  strike  out  a  path  if  he  could.  The  im- 
memorial metaphysical  debate  about  free  will  is  not 
of  quite  so  much  moment  to  Religion  as  it  seems  to 
be,  since  she  'bases  her  call  to  men  upon  the  phe- 
nomena of  daily  experience  rather  than  upon  the 
premisses  and  conclusions  of  a  merely  formal  logic. 
Though  free  will  be  a  delusion  and  sin  a  shadow, 
still  the  shadow  is  of  a  fatal  sort  and  must  be  reck- 
oned with  in  a  world  where  shadows  sometimes  have 
more  meaning  than  the  substances  which  cast  them. 

Of  Salvation,  too.  Religion  has  much  to  say, 
meaning  by  it  a  possession  of  the  place  and  power 
of  mastery  which  belong  to  man  of  right  —  a  place 
and  power  into  which,  to  be  sure,  he  was  never 
thrust  by  any  creative  violence,  but  which  have 
always  been  his  in  some  degree,  and  which  in  their 
perfection  represent  the  goal  of  his  development. 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  ^ 

It  is  in  the  exercise  of  the  great  divine-human  func- 
tions of  faith,  hope,  and  love  that  salvation  is  air 
tained.  Religion  indeed  cares  little  enough  whether 
man  thinks  of  this  condition  as  attained  or  con- 
ferred, —  her  greatest  literature  uses  both  forms  of 
speech,  —  since  it  consists  in  the  entrance  of  the 
Divine  Spirit,  the  Vital  Creative  and  Sustaining 
Power,  into  a  man's  life  as  its  regnant  influence; 
and  it  results  in  a  peace  which  comes  of  a  conscious 
mastery  of  circumstance  by  the  man  himself.  He  is 
no  longer  debased  by  poverty;  he  is  no  longer 
afraid  of  to-morrow;  he  is  no  longer  killed  by 
death.  Great  thoughts  become  his  companions  and 
great  deeds  his  ambition  —  the  greatest  of  all,  per- 
haps, being  the  realization  of  the  worth  of  small 
things,  and  the  doing  of  them  patiently. 

It  will  be  readily  admitted  that  here  we  have  the 
material  of  literature ;  for  literature  like  religion 
depends  upon  vision  and  sympathy.  Both  deal  with 
matters  of  the  common  day ;  but  neither  stops  in 
the  common,  or  counts  it  to  be  unclean.  The  burn- 
ing wayside  shrub  suddenly  becoming  vocal  and 
transforming  its  neighbourhood  into  sacred  ground 
because  the  spirit  of  truth  inflames  it,  is  the  sym- 
bol of  religious  and  literary  inspiration  —  yes,  and 
of  scientific  inspiration,  too,  as  we  shall  delight 
to  acknowledge  when  we  have  become  more  truly 
clairvoyant.  Both  literature  and  religion  deal  with 
the  elemental  things  in  man  and  nature ;  both  are 
gifts  to  the  imagination  and  make  corresponding 


14  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

demands  upon  it.  The  poet  takes  of  the  things  of 
life  and  shows  them  to  us,  whether  they  be  the  Sat- 
urday evening  happenings  in  the  cottage  of  a  Scots 
peasant,  or  the  struggle  of  a  soul  climbing  the 
Mount  of  Paradise.  The  prophet  looks  upon  a  bas- 
ket of  summer  fruit,  and  in  its  over-ripeness  sees 
the  doom  which  threatens  Israel ;  or  he  has  a  vision 
of  the  lot  of  such  as  wait  upon  the  Lord,  uplifted 
on  eagle's  wings,  running  without  weariness,  and 
walking  the  dustiest  ways  without  fainting  —  ever 
masters  of  fate.  All  these  things,  little  and  great 
alike,  are  taken  up  by  religion  and  literature  and 
shown  to  us  under  their  universal  aspect :  the  Past 
is  made  Present,  and  the  Present  is  related  indis- 
solubly  to  the  Past;  indeed  hunger,  want,  love, 
hate,  joy,  sorrow,  sin,  penitence,  and  forgiveness 
cease  to  be  either  old  or  new  and  become  perennial 
when  touched  by  the  hand  of  the  Spirit's  inter- 
preter. Thus  the  wonder  of  the  stars  above  and  of 
the  instincts  of  the  heart  within  is  renewed  in  each 
generation.  Hence,  despite  the  fact  that  there  is 
nothing  new  under  the  sun,  neither  literature  nor 
religion  ever  palls,  becomes  obsolete,  or  bygone. 
Their  forms  of  expression  change  but  the  substance 
remains  fresh  and  vital.  The  longer  our  experience 
of  the  Universe  in  which  God  dwells  and  through 
th«  avenues  of  which  His  Spirit  enters  into  touch 
with  man,  the  more  our  wonder  grows  at  man's  lit- 
tleness and  greatness,  his  limitations  and  his  chance. 
"  What  is  man,  that  thou  art  mindful  of  him,  and 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  16 

the  son  of  man,  that  thou  visitest  him  ?  "  asked  the 
Hebrew  poet,  face  to  face  with  this  contrast ;  con- 
scious of  the  brevity  of  his  life's  span,  but  equally 
assured  that  it  sufficed  to  set  him  face  to  face  with 
God.  Stevenson  voiced  the  same  wonder  and  im- 
plied the  same  faith  in  exclaiming :  — 

"  What  a  monstrous  spectre  is  this  man,  the  dis- 
ease of  the  agglutinated  dust,  lifting  alternate  feet 
or  lying  drugged  with  slumber ;  killing,  feeding, 
growing,  bringing  forth  small  copies  of  himself; 
grown  upon  with  hair  like  grass,  fitted  with  eyes 
that  move  and  glitter  in  his  face ;  a  thing  to  set 
children  screaming  !  —  and  yet,  looked  at  nearlier, 
known  as  his  fellows  know  him,  how  surprising  are 
his  attributes !  Poor  soul,  here  for  so  little,  cast 
among  so  many  hardships,  filled  with  desires  so  in- 
commensurate and  so  inconsistent,  savagely  sur- 
rounded, savagely  descended,  irremediably  con- 
demned to  prey  upon  his  fellow  lives :  who  should 
have  blamed  him  had  he  been  of  a  piece  with  his 
destiny  and  a  being  merely  barbarous  ?  And  we 
look  and  behold  him  instead  filled  with  imperfect 
virtues ;  infinitely  childish,  often  admirably  valiant, 
often  touchingly  kind ;  sitting  down,  amidst  his 
momentary  life,  to  debate  of  right  and  wrong  and 
the  attributes  of  the  Deity ;  rising  up  to  do  battle 
for  an  egg  or  die  for  an  idea;  singling  out  his 
friends  or  his  mate  with  cordial  affection ;  bringing 
forth  in  pain,  rearing  with  long-suffering  solicitude 
his  young.  To  touch  the  heart  of  his  mystery,  we 
find  in  him  one  thought,  strange  to  the  point  of 
lunacy  :  the  thought  of  duty ;  the  thought  of  some- 


16  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

thing  owing  to  himself,  to  his  neighbour,  to  his  God ; 
an  ideal  of  decency,  to  which  he  would  rise  if  it 
were  possible ;  a  limit  of  shame,  below  which,  if  it 
be  possible,  he  will  not  stoop."  ^ 

The  development  of  so  much  that  is  great  in 
language  from  the  written  oracles  of  religion  has 
therefore  been  a  natural  one,  and  it  is  fitting  that 
German  should  be  under  such  obligation  to  the 
Gothic  Scriptures  of  Ulfilas  and  to  the  Bible  of 
Martin  Luther ;  even  as  English  is  debtor  to  Wick- 
liffe,  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer,  and  the  King 
James  Version.  It  is  fitting,  too,  that  we  should 
emphasize  as  the  present  generation  is  doing  the 
extraordinary  literary  quality  of  the  matter  as 
well  as  the  manner  of  Hebrew  and  Christian 
Scripture.  These  deal,  as  has  been  already  im- 
plied, with  common  human  experiences,  but  they 
conceive  these  experiences  under  universal  forms. 
The  traditions  of  the  Old  Testament  are  in  this 
sense  ageless.  It  is  only  when  pulled  about  and 
tortured  by  some  unimaginative  critic  on  the  one 
hand,  or  by  some  nervous  and  faithless  apologist 
on  the  other,  that  they  lose  their  charm.  Their 
utter  naturalness  and  simplicity,  their  candour,  their 
artistic  restraint,  their  frequent  pathos  and  occa- 
sional humour,  all  fit  them  to  be  the  vehicles  of  a 

*  Across  the  Plains;  Pulvis  et  Umbra.  Cf.  Pascal :  Thoughts, cha^. 
X.  "  What  a  chimera,  then,  is  man  !  What  a  novelty,  what  a  chaos, 
what  a  subject  of  contradiction,  what  a  prodigy  I " 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  17 

divine  message.  In  view  of  this  fact  there  is  some- 
thing almost  pitiable  in  the  anxiety  with  which 
the  question  of  the  inspiration  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment is  discussed.  If  a  man  have  not  spiritual  and 
literary  sense  enough  to  perceive  this  inspiration, 
I  do  not  see  how  it  is  to  be  proved  to  him,  any 
more  than  the  glories  of  a  sunset  can  be  proved  to 
a  blind  man ;  or  if,  on  the  other  hand,  the  critic 
or  the  literalist  have  such  a  notion  of  inspiration 
as  to  fancy  that  imagination  can  play  no  part  in 
an  inspired  writing,  that  sacred  history  must  of 
necessity  be  a  collection  of  miraculously  inerrant 
annals,  and  that  in  a  book  calculated  to  perform 
a  peculiar  religious  office  no  place  can  be  found 
for  the  traditions,  legends,  and  poetry  of  a  pecu- 
liarly endowed  people,  again  it  is  hard  to  discover 
any  language  which  shall  be  mechanical  and  plod- 
ding enough  for  the  purposes  of  argiunent  with 
him. 

In  point  of  fact,  however,  argument  is  super- 
fluous here,  either  for  offence  or  defence.  The 
Spirit  speaks  through  Genesis,  and  would  still 
speak  to  such  as  have  ears  to  hear,  though  it  were 
robbed  of  every  claim  to  historicity.  Discerning 
men  feel  instinctively  the  appeal  of  Abraham 
turned  out  of  doors  by  his  faith,  the  conflict  of 
good  and  evil  in  shifty  Jacob,  the  moral  integrity 
of  exiled  Joseph,  the  long  patience  and  high  states- 
manship of  Moses  building  a  nation  out  of  a  horde 
of  slaves,  the  constancy  of  Ruth,  the  tragedy  of 


18  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Saul  trading  faith  for  superstition,  the  warfare  of 
flesh  and  spirit  in  David,  who,  like  Milton's  lion, 
lived  partly  in  the  air  of  God's  new  day  even 
while  his  body  was  still  chained  to  the  old  world  of 
mire  and  dust,  —  all  these,  to  say  nothing  of  the 
great  line  of  prophets,  are  of  every  time  and  for 
all  men.  They  translate  the  experience  of  religion 
into  a  lingua  franca  which  each  man  understands 
and  wherein  he  sees  his  own  hopes  and  struggles 
prefigured. 

It  is  not  difficult,  therefore,  to  establish  the 
legitimate  relation  between  religion  and  that  liter- 
ature which  deals  with  the  adventures  of  the  soul 
in  its  aspiration  toward  God,  or  its  rebellion  against 
Him.  What  shall  we  say  concerning  the  very  vo- 
luminous literature,  some  of  it  among  the  choicest 
possessions  of  our  speech  and  some  of  it  base  and 
sorry  enough,  which  deals  primarily  with  the  rela- 
tion of  the  sexes  and  the  passion  of  love?  It  has 
been  customary  to  treat  this  as  belonging  to  the 
'secular'  rather  than  to  the  'religious'  side  of  ex- 
perience. Yet  religion  is  the  great  unifier  —  the 
great  healer  of  schism ;  moreover,  its  natural  rela- 
tion to  human  love  has  been  made  plainer  and 
clearer  than  ever  before  by  the  advance  of  modern 
science  and  the  general  acceptance  of  the  theory 
of  development.  We  can  afford  to  admit,  at  least 
for  the  purposes  of  argument,  that  the  highest  and 
purest  affection  between  man  and  woman  is  of  the 
lineage — distant  perhaps,  but  none  the  less  real 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  19 

and  legitimate — of  mere  physical  affinity.  Chris- 
tianity recognizes  all  human  instincts  as  significant 
both  for  the  individual  and  for  the  race.  Its  appeal 
to  men  is  not  the  appeal  of  asceticism,  which  exalts 
the  partial,  but  the  appeal  of  an  expanding  and 
growing  life,  whose  goal  is  completeness.  When  it 
uses  the  language  of  asceticism,  advocating  even 
the  plucking  out  of  an  eye  or  the  cutting  away  of 
an  offending  hand,  it  is  with  the  express  statement 
that  formal  schism  in  the  physical  body  is  better 
than  real  schism  between  the  soul  and  God.  Holi- 
ness implies  wholeness ;  salvation  means  mastery  of 
circumstance;  and  this  mastery  must  begin  within 
before  it  can  be  enforced  without.  Rehgion  there- 
fore recognizes  all  interplay  of  human  passion  as 
one  of  its  chief  concerns.  All  efforts  toward  the 
orderly  development,  the  chastening  and  sublima- 
tion of  the  great  elemental  instincts  of  mankind, 
are  germane  to  it.  Hence  love  and  hunger  are  two 
of  the  principal  themes  of  religion  and  literature. 
Their  ramifications  are  as  infinitely  varied  as  life 
itself.  Love  begins,  let  us  say,  as  the  sexual  instinct 
which  leads  a  primitive  man  and  woman  to  pair  as 
the  animals  pair,  or  as  a  semi-gregarious  instinct 
which  leads  men  to  associate  themselves  tempo- 
rarily for  defence  or  adventure.  By  degrees  Cre- 
ative Power  worked  out  His  vast  purposes  through 
the  use  of  such  primitive  material  as  this.  The 
family  emerged  in  some  rudimentary  fashion. 
Children  must  needs  be  cared  for  and  nourished 


I 


20  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

through  a  term  of  infancy  whose  length  seemed  to 
be  out  of  all  proportion  to  man's  place  and  impor- 
tance as  a  mere  animal.  This  meant  common  self- 
denial,  restriction  of  freedom,  increase  of  mutual 
interest,  growth  of  sympathy  between  father  and 
mother,  parent  and  child.  Thought,  toil,  peril  for 
the  sake  of  one  another,  wrought  their  natural 
effects.  These  things  would  seem  at  first  sight  to 
have  set  limits  to  experience  and  to  have  narrowed 
life.  In  point  of  fact  they  gave  it  a  new  dimension, 
adding  depth  and  height  to  its  former  length.  Men 
began  to  live  by  deeds,  not  years.  The  greatest 
and  most  enduring  of  Christian  virtues  began  to 
be.  Of  course  the  path  of  this  development  must 
have  been  strewn  with  the  wrecks  of  tragedy  and 
enlivened  with  the  play  of  comedy.  It  is  a  long 
way  from  the  mere  instinct  of  sexual  affinity  to  the 
love  stronger  than  death  which  leads  a  man  and  a 
woman  to 

walk  this  world 
Yoked  in  all  exercise  of  noble  ends, 

but  the  path  is  continuous.  It  is  an  arduous  climb 
from  the  temporary  and  jealous  association  into 
which  the  passing  needs  of  a  primitive  day  once 
brought  two  men,  to  the  mutual  devotion  which 
leads  a  man  to  lay  down  his  life  for  his  friend ;  but 
the  ascent  has  been  made.  The  office  of  religion  is 
to  inspire  and  to  empower  these  travellers ;  it  is 
the  part  of  literature  to  tell  the  story  of  the  jour- 
ney. In  it  must  needs  appear  every  phase  of  expe- 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  21 

rience,  since  the  race  has  even  yet  accomplished  its 
redemption  so  imperfectly  that  love  is  dogged  by 
lust,  fealty  by  treachery,  and  joy  by  tears.  The  way 
is  long ;  some  wander  and  are  lost ;  some  fall  to 
rise  again,  and  some  to  rise  no  more ;  some  turn 
back  in  frank  rebellion ;  some  help  and  some  hin- 
der; some  are  always  hopeful  of  the  adventure's 
outcome ;  and  some  are  fearful  lest,  after  all  the 
struggle,  it  shall  appear  that  their  path  leads  no- 
whither.  For  all  these  religion  has  its  high  message ; 
of  them  all  literature  takes  careful  and  sympathetic 
note. 

The  literature,  therefore,  which  has  in  it  the 
deepest  and  most  significant  religious  element  will 
be  by  no  means  always  the  most  '  pious '  in  form. 
As  Dr.  T.  T.  Hunger  has  recently  put  it  with 
characteristic  grace  and  cogency :  — 

"  The  Christian  value  of  an  author  is  not  to  be 
determined  by  the  fulness  of  his  Christian  asser- 
tion. There  is,  of  course,  immense  value  in  the 
positive,  fuU-statured  believers  like  Dante  and 
Bacon  and  Milton  and  Browning.  .  .  .  But  Chris- 
tianity is  all  the  while  in  need  of  two  things : 
correction  of  its  mistakes  and  perversions,  and 
development  in  the  direction  of  its  universality. 
.  .  .  An  earnest  skeptic  is  often  the  best  man  to 
find  the  obscured  path  of  faith.  .  .  .  Goethe  taught 
Christianity  to  think  scientifically,  and  prepared  the 
way  for  it  to  include  modern  science."  * 

»  T.  T.  Hunger,  Essays  for  the  Day,  pp.  82-83. 


22  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

In  view  of  these  facts  it  remains  to  indicate  in  a 
cursory  and  general  way  some  of  the  interrelations 
between  religion  and  literature  which  seem  signifi- 
cant enough  to  be  the  objects  of  our  quest. 

In  the  first  place,  literature  often  avowedly  makes 
religion  its  chief  material.  This  is  true  in  the  case 
not  only  of  sermons  and  works  of  formal  divinity, 
which  belong  to  special  rather  than  general  litera- 
ture, but  of  the  great  literary  monuments.  The  idea 
of  tragedy  which  animated  ^schylus  and  Sophocles 
was  primarily  religious.  Lucretius  was  a  theologian. 

Lucretius  —  nobler  than  his  mood  ; 

Who  dropped  his  plummet  down  the  broad 

Deep  universe,  and  said  "  No  God," 

Finding  no  bottom :  he  denied 
Divinely  the  divine,  and  died 
Chief  poet  on  the  Tiber-side 

By  Grace  of  God  !  his  face  is  stern 
As  one  compelled,  in  spite  of  scorn, 
To  teach  a  truth  he  would  not  learn. 

The  adjective  divina,  to  which  Dante  gives  a 
chief  place  on  his  title-page,  is  the  most  significant 
and  descriptive  word  to  be  found  there.  Spenser 
sang  the  soul's  adventures  in  a  great  allegory.  Mil- 
ton's avowed  purpose  in  ''  Paradise  Lost "  was  to 
justify  the  ways  of  God  to  man ;  and  so  masterful 
was  his  genius  that,  for  weal  or  woe,  he  may  almost 
\^.  be  said  to  be  the  creator  of  the  heaven  and  hell  of 
English-speaking  folk.  Pope  filled  our  commonplace 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  23 

books  with  quotations  when  he  essayed  to  study 
man  in  his  moral  and  spiritual  aspect  —  a  theme 
as  religious  as  Pope's  day  and  style  would  permit. 
Johnson's  gigantic  capacity  for  prejudice  was  frankly 
enlisted  upon  the  side  of  the  religion  of  the  Church 
of  England  ;  yet  the  veriest  cynic  who  follows  his 
noble  and  pathetic,  even  if  somewhat  grotesque, 
figure  through  the  pages  of  the  "  Life,"  which  is, 
after  all,  Johnson's  chief  contribution  to  English 
literature,  must  admit  it  to  be  in  the  larger  sense 
a  profoundly  religious  book  —  a  book  for  the  soul's 
instruction  and  reproof  as  well  as  a  fountain  of 
humour  and  all  intellectual  delights. 

I  need  not  carry  my  illustrations  on  into  the 
special  field  which  we  are  about  to  traverse.  Enough 
have  been  cited  to  indicate  the  large  place  which 
leaders  and  inspirers  of  human  thought  have  seen 
fit  to  give  to  religion.  The  religious  problem  has 
seemed  to  be  the  one  to  which  great  and  clear  minds 
have  turned  instinctively  in  an  attempt  to  voice  a 
message  to  their  own  generation,  and,  perhaps,  if 
fate  were  kind,  to  reach  generations  then  unborn. 

An  even  more  interesting  bond  connecting  reli- 
gion and  literature  discovers  itself  as  we  consider 
the  literature  of  implicit  or  avowed  unbelief.  I  shall 
have  occasion  to  remark  upon  the  fact  at  some 
length  in  dealing  with  one  of  the  most  fascinating 
and  significant  sections  of  last  century's  literary 
product.  Suffice  it  to  say  here  that,  while  the 
scoffer  and  the  cynic  have  usually  but  small  chance 


24  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  even  a  literary  life  beyond  the  grave,  the  occa- 
sional exceptions  very  often  owe  their  quasi-immov' 
tality  to  the  fact  that  they  dealt  with  religious 
questions.  About  the  only  title  to  remembrance 
that  Lucian  can  be  said  to  have,  beyond  the  doubt- 
ful value  of  his  unique  Greek  to  college  class-rooms, 
is  the  fact  that  he  saw  fit  to  exercise  his  nimble 
wit  upon  the  gods.  Tom  Paine's  services  to  the 
cause  of  American  independence  were  real,  even 
though  not  very  great ;  yet  they  seem  likely  to  be 
forgotten  in  spite  of  all  that  disinterested  historians 
and  vehement  apologists  can  do  to  perpetuate  their 
memory.  Paine  will  be  remembered,  however,  be- 
cause he  has  associated  his  name  with  religion  — 
probably  not  with  hostile  intent,  for  there  is  a  posi- 
tive as  well  as  negative  side  to  his  "  Common 
Sense " ;  the  negative  side,  however,  was  the  one 
upon  which  posterity  has  fastened  its  regard,  and 
according  to  its  instinctive  habit,  which  is  either  to 
forget  such  a  man  altogether  or  else  to  remember 
him  as  persona  non  grata,  Paine  has  attained  to  a 
sorry  sort  of  fame.  He  must  be  reckoned  with,  for 
better  for  worse,  by  the  historian  of  his  century, 
mainly  on  the  ground  of  his  theological  works. 

So  upon  a  far  higher  plane,  while  Tyndall  and 
Huxley  won  their  deserved  repute  among  scientific 
men  by  their  originality  and  industry  as  investi- 
gators in  the  field  of  pure  science,  they  were  even 
more  indebted  for  the  prominence  and  influence 
which  were  finally  theirs  to  the  fact  that  both  be- 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  25 

came  theologians  of  eminence ;  so  quick  is  the  world 
to  recognize  the  word  of  any  man  who  speaks  upon 
the  subject  of  religion  as  one  having  authority,  to 
be  a  matter  of  immediate  moment. 

What  I  am  obliged,  for  lack  of  a  better  phrase, 
to  call,  rather  awkwardly,  the  precedent  influence 
of  religion  upon  literature  is  worth  at  least  a  pass- 
ing glance.  Monasteries  and  convents  were  for 
generations  the  home  and  refuge  of  letters.  The 
Church  has  always  been  the  nursing  mother  of 
literature  —  often  enough  unwise,  petulant,  over- 
anxious and  sometimes  even  cruel  in  her  fear,  but 
yet  fostering  and  passing  on  from  generation  to 
generation,  if  not  sound  learning  itself,  yet  the 
tools  and  means  for  its  development.  The  interest- 
ing studies  of  Mr.  Galton  in  the  antecedents  and 
circumstances  of  men  of  talent  or  genius  showed  a 
notably  large  percentage  of  them  to  have  come 
from  the  families  of  ministers  of  religion.  This  is 
natural  enough,  since,  whatever  their  circumstances, 
the  clergy  are,  as  a  class,  peculiarly  ambitious  to 
provide  the  best  educational  advantages  for  their 
children.  The  remotest  missionaries  covet  university 
training  for  their  sons,  and  obtain  it  in  an  astonish- 
ing number  of  cases.  Furthermore,  the  training  of 
clerical  homes  is  generally  of  a  sort  fitted  to  impress 
the  minds  of  children  with  the  worth  of  large  and 
generous  ideas,  the  impression  being  often  all  the 
more  vivid  because  the  amplitude  of  parental  inter- 
ests has  very  likely  been  attained  in  spite  of  circum- 


26  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

stances  so  narrow  as  to  make  daily  threats  of  sor- 
didness.  The  books  which  make  up  the  family 
library,  though  often  all  too  few,  are  sure  to  contain 
some  genuine  literature ;  the  newspapers  and  maga- 
zines which  find  their  way  to  the  reading-table  are 
chosen  with  discrimination;  and  the  whole  atmo- 
sphere of  the  home  is  relatively  congenial  to  obser- 
vation and  thought.  Let  it  be  added,  too,  that  it  is 
likely  to  be  illuminated  with  a  play  of  humour  which 
stimulates  the  imagination,  and  lightens  while  it  en- 
courages intellectual  activity ;  since,  as  I  shall  have 
occasion  to  show  somewhat  later  on,  humour  is  of 
the  household  of  faith,  —  a  sister  sitting  by  right, 
and  not  by  mere  sufferance,  at  Religion's  table. 

This  brief  reference  will  suffice  to  suggest  the 
relation  which  naturally  exists  between  the  office 
of  the  minister  of  religion  and  the  production  of 
literature.  He  is  called,  and  his  business  is  to  call 
others,  to  love  God  with  the  mind  as  well  as  with 
the  heart.  All  human  experience  should  therefore 
interest  him.  As  a  confessor  and  adviser  the  secrets 
of  many  hearts  are  opened  to  him,  and  thus  the 
choicest  material  of  literature  is  placed  at  his  hand. 
Honour  forbids  him  to  use  it,  to  be  sure,  as  it  forbids 
one  who  has  but  a  life  interest  in  an  estate  to  im- 
pair its  integrity ;  but  there  is  none  the  less  an 
inevitable  and  legitimate  increment  of  profit  inur- 
ing to  him.  The  business  of  his  soul  within  and  of 
his  profession  without  makes  him  sympathetic  with 
literature  and  a  more  or  less  keen  student  of  the 


RELIGION   AND  LITERATURE  27 

literary  product  of  his  day.  It  is  not  strange,  there- 
fore, that  the  majority  of  our  higher  institutions  of 
learning  should  have  been  founded  by  men  com- 
mitted to  the  interests  of  religion ;  or  that  clergy- 
men and  their  children,  unto  the  third  and  fourth 
generation,  should  so  often  be  numbered  among 
the  writers  of  books. 

So  every  great  religious  movement  leaves  its 
mark  in  letters.  ^Literary  men'  are  proverbially 
prone  to  sneer  at  religious  revival ;  yet  the  sneer  ill 
becomes  those  who  love  good  literature.  The  literary 
prowess  of  Germany  is  inextricably  linked  to  the 
spirit  of  the  Reformation.  The  achievements  of 
Queen  Elizabeth's  day  in  letters  cannot  be  divorced 
from  the  searchings  of  heart  and  the  awakenings 
of  imaofination  and  ambition  which  marked  the 
reign  of  her  father.  The  Evangelical  Revival  and 
its  inevitable  counterpart,  the  Oxford  Movement, 
left  ineffaceable  imprints  upon  the  English  literature 
of  last  century.  The  famous  Clapham  sect  might 
serve  as  a  concrete  example.  Here  were  a  group  of 
highly  intelligent  families,  committed  heart  and 
soul  to  the  principles  of  the  Evangelical  faith,  and 
living  in  sufficiently  close  touch  for  frequent  social 
intercourse  and  constant  interchange  of  ideas.  Who 
shall  measure  the  literary  influence  of  the  Wilber- 
forces,  the  Macaulays,  and  two  generations  of  the 
Trevelyans,  together  with  Stephen  and  his  sons 
Sir  James  FitzJames  and  Sir  Leslie,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  Venns  and  Gisbornes?  It  does  not  matter 


28  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

from  our  present  standpoint  that  the  children  in 
several  instances  departed  widely  from  the  faith  of 
the  fathers ;  the  thesis  might  conceivably  be  main- 
tained that  the  wider  the  departure  the  more  clearly 
marked  was  the  religious  impulse  ;  but  whether  this 
be  the  case  or  not,  it  suffices  for  our  present  pur- 
pose to  note  the  undeniable  precedent  religious  ele- 
ment in  the  literature  produced  by  this  group  of 
families.  I  am  content  to  indicate  the  phenomenon. 
My  only  claim  at  present  is  that  it  is  significant 
enough  to  challenge  investigation. 

As  our  discussion  proceeds,  some  further  inter- 
relations between  religion  and  literature  will  be 
pointed  out.  Though  not  necessarily  of  minor  im- 
portance, they  are  less  likely  to  demand  constant 
attention  than  the  three  already  indicated.  It  is  no 
part  of  my  purpose  to  sketch  the  whole  course  of 
English  literature  during  the  fruitful  century  to  be 
considered,  or  to  treat  the  work  of  any  of  its  great 
contributors  exhaustively.  In  many  cases  I  shall 
prefer  to  choose,  always  I  hope  with  fairness,  some 
one  work  of  an  author  as  significant  of  the  religious 
element  in  his  writing ;  nor  shall  I  hesitate  to  turn 
aside  now  and  then  to  consider  the  productions  of 
some  writers  whose  claim  to  a  place  among  con- 
tributors to  permanent  literature  is  in  grave  doubt, 
if  only  they  seem  to  be  representatives  of  their  day. 
I  especially  desire  to  givQ  generous  treatment  to 
the  large  and  eminently  characteristic  group  of 
writers  whose  attitude  toward  Christianity  in  par- 


RELIGION  AND  LITERATURE  29 

ticular,  or  toward  religion  in  general,  has  appeared 
to  be  one  of  searching  criticism  if  not  of  positive 
hostility.  It  may  be  that  these  will  prove  to  be  the 
most  significant  witnesses  of  all  to  the  ineradicable 
fascination  which  religion  seems  to  exercise  over 
the  mind  of  man.  Wherever  the  mystery  of  life  and 
death  asserts  itself  a  door  stands  open  to  the  en- 
trance of  religion^  and  the  material  of  literature  is 
ready. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   DAWN   OF   THE   NEW   DAY 

Mr.  Watts-Dunton,  in  his  essay  on  "  The  Renas- 
cence of  Wonder  in  Poetry,"  has  characterized  the 
eighteenth  century  as  a  period  of  acceptance;  in 
contrast  wherewith  he  considers  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury to  have  been  a  period  of  reawakening  wonder. 
There  is  something  more  than  a  half-truth  in  his 
suggestion.  It  is  as  difficult  to  define  an  age  as  to 
define  a  person  —  and  the  definition  of  persons  is 
frankly  impossible.  All  attempts  even  to  characterize 
them  are  attended  with  well-nigh  equal  danger  and 
fascination.  Character  is  so  elusive  and  yet  so  mo- 
mentous a  thing  that  clever  talk  about  it  possesses 
unfailing  interest ;  we  are  so  prone,  on  the  other 
hand,  to  jump  at  conclusions  which  eventually  prove 
to  be  our  own  condemnation,  as  to  make  all  gos- 
sip perilous,  and  all  personal  judgement  doubtful. 
Within  limits,  however,  we  may  admit '  acceptance ' 
to  have  been  a  characteristic  note  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  especially  as  voiced  in  its  poetry  and  po- 
liter letters.  That  last  adjective  indeed  was  the  bane 
of  its  literature.  Things  that  would  not  submit  to 
polish  were  anathema  to  Pope  and  his  school.  An 
atmosphere  of   literal  urbanity  surround-ed  their 


THE  DAWN   OF  THE  NEW  DAY  31 

writing,  nowhere  more  evidently  than  when  nature 
or  the  country  was  the  theme.  A  partial  exception 
may  be  made  in  favour  of  Thomson,  whose  "Sea- 
sons "  were  in  some  real  sense  the  seasons  which  we 
know.  But,  in  general,  when  the  sights  and  sounds 
of  rural  life  were  dealt  with,  it  was  with  half-veiled 
apology  and  patronage,  or  with  a  sentimental  af- 
fectation for  which  great  literary  gifts  and  exquisite 
workmanship  could  ill  atone.  Goldsmith  had  a 
tender  heart  and  an  acquaintance  at  first  hand  with 
the  sorrows  and  struggles  of  the  poor ;  yet  there  is 
something  about  "  Sweet  Auburn  "  which  irresisti- 
bly recalls  Marie  Antoinette's  high-heeled  shepherd- 
esses playing  at  country  life  in  the  gardens  of 
Versailles.  None  the  less  it  was  mightily  to  the 
taste  of  Goldsmith's  day,  and  most  pronouncedly 
so,  one  suspects,  when  it  was  most  sentimental.  "  I 
shall  never  be  tired  of  Goldsmith's  *  Deserted 
Village '  —  I  shall  never  look  again  into  Crabbe's 
^  Village,' "  said  Mrs.  Barbauld  characteristically 
enough  to  Crabb  Robinson  ;  who,  it  must  be  added, 
had  himself  so  much  of  the  spirit  of  acceptance 
that  he  declined  to  read  the  later  works  of  this 
great  poet  of  the  poor.^ 

I  have  elsewhere  maintained^  that  the  nineteenth 
century  has  been  very  largely  characterized  by  the 
emphasis  which  it  has  put  upon  accomplishment — 
upon  the  Deed  as  contrasted  with  the  Word,  the 

1  Diary,  Dec.  29,  1835. 

'  Dynamic  of  Christianity ^  chap.  ii. 


32  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

form  instead  of  the  spirit  of  revelation.  It  has 
been  an  age  of  enormously  significant  discovery, 
but  the  results  have  remained  to  a  large  extent  in  the 
form  of  facts,  instead  of  resolving  themselves  into 
digestible  and  assimilable  truth.  Mr.  Watts-Dunton 
calls  it  an  age  of  wonder ;  but  it  seems  rather  to  have 
been  an  age  when  the  capacity  for  wonder  had  just 
begun  to  awake.  The  wealth  of  material  which  nat- 
ural science  and  industrial  invention  have  supplied 
to  life  has  been  so  great  as  to  reduce  the  capacity 
for  reverent  wonder  in  those  very  regions  where  we 
should  expect  it  to  have  been  enhanced.  The  third 
quarter  of  the  century  wondered  truly — but  less  at 
the  mystery  of  life,  death,  and  human  personality 
than  at  its  own  marvellous  achievements.  Hence 
has  arisen  a  sort  of  scientific  dogmatism  not  infre- 
quently approaching  Pharisaism.  This  sophomoric 
phase  of  experience  shows  signs  of  passing  away, 
with  the  realization  that  mystery  is  still  as  great 
an  element  as  ever  in  human  life,  and  that  the 
extension  of  our  radius  of  experience  has  served 
only  to  enlarge  —  and,  be  it  noted,  in  proportion 
to  the  square  of  our  progress — its  already  mighty 
horizon. 

It  was  but  natural,  therefore,  that  the  great  liter- 
ature of  the  century  should  be  the  product  of  its 
earlier  half.  The  sense  of  a  humble  and  more  seemly 
wonder  was  upon  men  then.  They  had  passed 
through  a  great  political  and  social  transition.  Many 
of  them  felt  the  approach  of  further  changes  not  less 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  33 

significant  than  those  associated  with  the  French 
Revolution,  although  they  could  not  say  where  these 
would  manifest  themselves.  But  some,  looking  out 
with  the  eye  of  true  clairvoyance,  discerned  enough 
of  the  future  to  thrill  their  own  and  later  generations 
with  their  prophecies.  I  do  not  see  how  any  one  can 
read  Tennyson's  anticipations  of  the  spiritual  sig- 
nificance of  Evolution,  or  contemplate  Goethe's  vi- 
sion of  the  character  which  the  thoug^ht  of  the  cen- 
tury  was  to  assume,  or  even  note  De  Tocqueville's 
extraordinary  prescience  of  America's  opportunity 
and  danger,  without  acknowledging  that  a  spirit 
of  genuine  prophecy  was  still  active  in  the  world's 
affairs.  These  seers  were  not  only  endowed  with 
the  literary  gift,  but  were  also  entrusted  with  a  mes- 
sage fitted  to  their  day,  capable  of  assimilation  by 
life,  and  of  transformation  into  goodness.  Since, 
then,  it  is  to  the  former  half  of  the  century  that  we 
must  look  for  its  greatest  and  most  significant  litera- 
ture, we  have  now  to  inquire  as  to  the  forerunners 
and  heralds  of  this  new  day. 

Revolution  is  proverbially  hard  to  account  for. 
We  no  sooner  think  our  discovery  of  its  origins  to 
be  satisfyingly  complete  than  a  new  set  of  causes 
reveal  themselves  and  must  in  turn  be  dealt  with.  I 
shall  not  attempt,  therefore,  to  run  to  earth  the  lit- 
erary influences  which  finally  made  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  Byron,  and  Shelley  possible,  but  shall  be 
content  rather  to  note  four  siofnificant  fiofures  be- 
longing  primarily  to  the  eighteenth  century,  but  into 


34  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  heritage  of  whose  influence  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury richly  entered. 

William  Cowper  was  the  last  man  in  the  world 
whom  those  who  knew  him  in  his  lifetime  could 
have  thought  to  be  a  revolutionist ;  nor  does  he 
act  the  part  any  better  when  he  is  looked  at  in 
retrospect :  so  used  have  we  become  to  associate 
the  inception  of  revolution  with  plots,  and  its  overt 
acts  with  gunpowder  barrels,  guillotines,  or  dyna- 
mite. 

In  Cowper's  case  the  weapon  was  a  sofa,  and  his 
fellow  conspirators  two  eminently  respectable  mid- 
dle-aged widows.  No  life  could  have  seemed  milder 
or  less  likely  to  make  a  stir  in  the  world  than  Cow- 
per's, whether  we  find  him  in  youth  "  giggling 
and  making  giggle"  with  his  pretty  cousins  in 
Southampton  Row ;  or  thrown  into  a  panic  of 
shyness  by  the  prospect  of  qualifying  as  a  reader 
in  the  House  of  Lords,  where  he  might  easily  have 
attained  to  a  modest,  but  in  all  probability  a  life- 
long, competence  ;  or  as  a  man  fleeing  to  his  refuge 
with  the  kind  Unwins  in  Huntingdon,  and  later 
still  retiring  to  the  isolation  and  busy  idleness  of 
Olney,  there  to  become  the  neighbour  of  Newton 
and  the  permanent  ward  of  Mary  Unwin.  No  ca- 
reer could  have  been  more  monotonous  in  its  out- 
ward seeming ;  no  career  in  reality  was  ever  more 
truly  adventurous.  A  pathos  that  is  real  and  free 
from  sentimentality  attaches  to  the  thought  of  the 
snugness  and  delightful  monotony  of  home  em- 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  35 

ploy  men  ts,  when  they  are  remembered  in  loneliness 
or  peril  as  some  castaway  attempts  upon  his  isolated 
rock  to  frame  the  semblance  of  them  out  of  such 
flotsam  and  jetsam  as  he  can  rescue  from  the  sea. 
Yet  this  was  Cowper's  life  experience.  He  had  the 
material  furnishings  of  domesticity  about  him  from 
the  cradle  to  the  grave ;  but  his  capacity  to  enjoy 
them  was  fearfully  intermittent.  Amid  his  flower- 
pots, rabbit-hutches,  and  carpenter's  tools;  his  walks 
by  Ouse  and  tea-drinkings  at  home;  his  books  and 
correspondents,  he  was  still  a  hunted  man.  None 
could  tell  when  morning  broke  whether  the  day 
were  marked  for  peace  and  light,  or  whether  the 
sun  would  go  down  at  noon  to  be  succeeded  by  a 
horror  of  great  darkness. 

Much  has  been  made  of  the  seclusion  and  quiet 
amid  which  Cowper  did  his  work ;  of  the  half-ef- 
feminate willingness  which  he  showed  to  live  thus 
under  shelter,  and  apart,  not  merely  from  the  world's 
hubbub,  but  from  its  responsibilities.  In  point  of 
fact,  that  Olney  house  and  garden  were  like  the 
fastness  in  a  child's  story  hidden  in  a  mountain 
valley  or  behind  a  screen  of  palms  upon  some  coral 
island ;  delightful  in  its  seclusion  and  seeming  peace, 
but  yet  the  abode  of  fear  ;  because  savage  marauders- 
threaten  and  means  of  defence  are  pitifully  inade- 
quate. The  tragedy  of  such  tales  is  often  nine- 
tenths  comedy,  so  sure  are  we  that  the  deus  ex 
machina  will  appear  in  the  moment  of  crisis.  In 
Cowper's  life  the  tragic  element  was  as  constant  as 


36  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

it  was  real,  and  in  the  supreme  moment  there  was 
no  relief  but  that  of  death.  "  What  can  it  signify  ?  " 
are  reported  to  have  been  his  last  words  in  response 
to  an  offer  of  nourishment ;  but  after  the  change 
had  come,  those  who  stood  about  him  noted  that 
from  the  hour  of  death  until  the  coffin  was  closed 
"  the  expression  into  which  his  countenance  had 
settled  was  that  of  calmness  and  composure,  min- 
gled as  it  were  with  holy  surprise."^ 

Here  are  all  the  elements  of  adventure  and  of 
tragedy.  To  see  this  man  sleeping  well  after  a 
life  whose  unavailing  struggle  for  calm  had  made 
it  indeed  a  fitful  fever,  may  easily  have  seemed  to 
illuminate  his  fine  countenance  with  the  light  of  a 
holy  surprise. 

In  spite  of  a  general  impression  to  the  contrary, 
Cowper's  madness  was  in  the  first  place  no  more  re- 
lated to  religion  than  to  the  binomial  theorem,  as 
Mr.  Birrell  has  happily  reminded  us.  His  mind  was 
unhinged  by  the  excitement  and  worry  of  his  ex- 
pected appearance  at  the  bar  of  the  House  of  Lords 
to  qualify  for  a  readership.  The  resultant  shock,  re- 
acting upon  a  nervous  system  always  delicate  and 
already  diseased,  reduced  it  to  a  condition  of  chronic 
instability.  Fits  of  pronounced  insanity  recurred, 
and  there  were  several  attempts  at  self-destruction. 
Yet  during  the  greater  portion  of  his  life  Cowper 
was  sufficiently  master  of  himself  to  go  his  own  way 
and  to  do  his  own  work,  proving  himself  to  be  one 

*  Wright,  Life  of  William  Cowper,  p.  657. 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  37 

of  the  best  of  companions  and  perhaps  the  very  best 
of  correspondents.  One  dare  not  dogmatize  here, 
but  year  in  and  year  out,  on  week-days  and  Sundays 
ahke,  his  letters  maintain  a  place  beside  Boswell^s 
"  Life"  in  the  first  rank  among  publications  of  their 
own  type,  —  books  to  take  upon  a  journey,  even  to 
carry  into  exile,  and  yet  to  reopen  with  a  new  delight 
after  returning  to  one's  fireside.  Where  else  are  good 
breeding,  good  sense,  good  taste,  affectionate  rail- 
lery, a  quick  appreciation  of  beauty,  a  genuine  and 
unobtrusive  piety,  and  a  deliciously  keen  and  natu- 
ral humour  to  be  found  in  so  perfect  a  combination? 
No  one  can  hope  to  compose  letters  to-day  in  Cow- 
per's  style,  but  every  one  who  must  write  at  all 
would  surely  be  not  only  a  better  writer  but  a  bet- 
ter man  for  numbering  this  recluse  of  Olney  in  his 
list  of  friends. 

There  used  to  be  a  child's  story  with  appropriate 
illustrations  representing  a  reformed  pirate  who  took 
a  vine-clad  cottage  by  the  sea,  and  whose  wont  it 
was,  when  fits  of  Berserker  rage  threatened,  to  sit 
at  his  door  and  knit  antimacassars.  Cowper  would 
have  appreciated  its  drollery,  for  he  had  a  keen 
sense  of  the  absurd,  and  spent  a  night  that  was  well 
nigh  sleepless  for  laughter  after  hearing  the  adven- 
ture of  John  Gilpin,  which  he  immortalized  in  verse 
the  next  day ;  yet  behind  the  extravaganza  he  might 
well  have  seen  a  sombre  picture  of  himself  fighting 
the  fiends  with  his  pen.  "Doomed,  yet  debonnaire," 
as  Mr.  Birrell  calls  him,  he  took  to  verse  to  save  his 


38  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

life,  and  threw  his  poems  out  that  the  diversion 
which  their  production  and  reception  caused  might 
grant  him  at  least  a  respite  from  the  wolves  of  his 
despair.  The  more  quiet  and  commonplace  the 
theme,  the  more  suited  was  it  to  its  purpose ;  fancy 
might  the  better  play  about  it  without  danger  of 
over-excitement,  and  Cowper's  fancy  was  of  just 
the  sort  to  illuminate  the  commonplace  and  to  give 
it  significance.  This  is  not  strictly  true,  perhaps, 
of  the  "  Table-Talk,"  where  he  was  hampered  by 
his  acceptance  of  the  rhymed  couplet  in  which  all 
would-be  poets  of  his  century  aspired  to  jingle.  But 
when  Lady  Austen  came  to  Olney,  bringing  a  new 
element  of  clever  companionship  into  the  poet's  life, 
and  set  him  to  the  task  of  writing  a  poem  upon  the 
sofa  in  their  sitting-room,  English  literature  had 
good  cause  to  note  the  day.  Forthwith  this  middle- 
aged  writer  of  excellent  verse,  ^  commenced  poet,' 
as  the  cant  phrase  goes,  in  good  earnest.  He  not 
only  rejuvenated  blank  verse ;  he  brought  back  the 
notes  of  reality  and  simplicity  to  English  poetry. 
With  facile  pen,  quick  wit,  and  devout  reverence 
for  all  that  was  true,  just,  pure,  and  lovely,  whether 
as  yet  it  were  of  good  report  among  men  or  not,  he 
wrought  with  glad  diligence  to  fulfil  his  friend's 
behest.  He  sang  of  fireside  joys,  of  the  gracious 
companionships  of  home,  of  winter  nights  and 
noons,  of  walks  abroad  by  Ouse,  of  ploughmen  in 
the  fields  and  woodmen  in  the  forests,  of  wild  birds, 
tame  hares,  and  grazing  cattle. 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  39 

Nor  rural  sights  alone,  but  rural  sounds, 
Exhilarate  the  spirit,  and  restore 
The  tone  of  languid  Nature.  Mighty  winds, 
That  sweep  the  skirt  of  some  far-spreading  wood 
Of  ancient  growth,  make  music  not  unlike 
The  dash  of  Ocean  on  his  winding  shore, 
And  lull  the  spirit  while  they  fill  the  mind.^ 

That  last  line  might  serve  as  motto  for  a  large 
part  of  Cowper's  work.  He  who  would  know  the 
poet  must  make  acquaintance  with  "  The  Task." 
It  is  the  window  which  permits  us  now  to  look  out 
with  him  upon  the  world,  and  now  to  look  in  upon 
a  troubled  spirit  seeking  rest,  and  a  mind  which 
must  needs  be  filled  with  less  disquieting  cargo  than 
self-contemplation  afforded,  if  it  were  to  keep  a 
straight  course  or  avoid  ultimate  shipwreck.  A  dis- 
cerning critic  has  called  attention  to  the  fact  that 

"  his  playful  satire  and  tender  admonition,  his  de- 
nunciation of  slavery,  his  noble  patriotism,  his  devo- 
tional earnestness  and  sublimitv,  his  tenderness  to 
animals,  his  affection  for  his  pets,  his  warm  sympa- 
thy with  his  fellow-men,  and  his  exquisite  paintings 
of  domestic  peace  and  happiness  are  all  so  much 
self-portraiture,  drawn  with  the  ripe  skill  of  a  mas- 
ter and  the  modesty  and  good  taste  of  the  man. 
The  very  rapidity  of  his  transitions,  where  things 
light  and  sportive  are  ranged  alongside  the  most 
solemn  truths,  is  characteristic  of  his  temperament 
in  ordinary  life." 

»  TTie  Tosh,  bk.  i,  vv.  181-187. 


40  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

To  sketch  even  in  outline  the  extent  and  variety 
of  Cowper's  poetry  is  beside  my  present  purpose. 
Limitations  of  space  forbid  me  to  say  anything  fur- 
ther of  the  inimitable  letters  —  which  may  after  all 
be  well,  since  they  constitute  a  sort  of  land  of  the 
lotus-eaters  and  threaten  the  further  progress  of 
him  who  begins  to  linger  there.  It  remains  there- 
fore to  speak  of  religion  as  an  element  in  his  work. 
It  has  become  the  fashion  to  divide  responsibility 
for  Cowper's  mental  anguish  between  Calvinism  and 
John  Newton.  Critics  have  implied,  when  they  have 
not  argued,  that  if  the  tenets  of  the  former  had 
been  less  arduous,  and  the  friendship  of  the  latter 
more  judicious,  the  poet  might  have  known  placid 
days  and  quiet  nights  in  place  of  his  fearful  expec- 
tation of  judgement.  I  have  already  noted  the  fact 
that  religion  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  first  access 
of  insanity.  After  that,  and  its  accompanying  at- 
tempt at  suicide,  physical  conditions  undoubtedly 
existed  which  doomed  a  man  of  Cowper's  tempera- 
ment to  recurrent  attacks  of  extreme  nervous  de- 
pression. Under  these  circumstances  it  was  almost 
inevitable  that  something  should  become  an  obses- 
sion—  preferably  some  very  great  and  remote,  or 
else  some  near  but  insignificant,  matter.  In  Cow- 
per's case  the  prevalent  Calvinism  of  his  day  fur- 
nished in  its  doctrine  of  reprobation  a  theme 
precisely  fitted  to  take  tyrannous  possession  of  his 
unquiet  mind.  It  is  reasonably  certain  that  John 
Newton  kept  this  doctrine  among  the  weapons  of 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  41 

his  theological  arsenal ;  it  is  most  improbable  that 
he  ever  used  it  against  William  Cowper,  in  spite  of 
the  tradition  that  once  he  gave  a  partial  and  halting 
assent  to  the  poet's  fear  concerning  himself.  Cal- 
vinists  of  the  extreme  sort  have  always  been  better 
than  their  creeds.  The  doctrine  of  reprobation  has 
been  too  awful  to  be  launched  even  at  the  heads  of 
one's  enemies,  to  say  nothing  of  its  hasty  applica- 
tion to  one's  friends.  It  is  reasonable  to  suppose 
that  Newton  felt  this.  He  was  called  to  preach  sal- 
vation; if  damnation  were  to  be  dealt  out,  that 
was  God's  prerogative.  Newton  was  a  brave,  kind- 
hearted,  sane,  strong  man,  as  little  addicted  to 
hysteria  as  John  Wesley  himself.  There  is  a  world 
of  evidence  to  show  that  he  was  a  support  and  stay 
to  Cowper's  troubled  soul ;  very  little  to  indicate 
that  he  ever  wrought  him  up  to  an  undue  pitch  of 
excitement.  Perhaps  he  was  somewhat  too  thick- 
skinned  and  masculine  to  deal  with  a  temperament 
so  delicately  constituted  as  was  the  poet's ;  but  on 
the  other  hand  the  sturdiness  of  his  robust  faith 
was  better  fitted  to  Cowper's  need  than  the  fussy 
sympathy  of  a  sentimentalist  could  have  been.  It 
is  worthy  of  note,  too,  that  Newton's  criticism  of 
Cowper's  literary  work  has  something  to  commend 
it,  and  that  his  judgement  upon  the  attempt  to 
translate  Homer  has  been  approved  by  posterity, 
though  upon  different  ground  from  that  which  he 
maintained.  This  ex-slave-captain  was  something 
of  a  prodigy ;  but  I  incline  to  believe  that  the  in- 


42  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tricacies  and  probable  contradictions  in  his  life  and 
character  have  been  more  clearly  discerned  and  far 
more  judiciously  estimated  by  Sir  James  Stephen 
than  by  Mrs.  Oliphant/ 

Let  this  be  as  it  may,  however,  it  remains  true 
of  Cowper  that,  if  a  theological  obsession  were  his 
bane,  religion  was  his  blessing.  He  was  the  son  of 
a  clergyman.  His  "Lines  to  my  Mother's  Picture" 
—  lines  which  Tennyson  professed  himself  unable 
to  read  without  tears  —  remain  to  assure  us  of  his 
filial  piety.  They  speak,  too,  in  vivid  terms  of  his 
own  religious  hope  and  fear.  He  pictures  himself 
as  a  ship  voyaging  toward  the  haven  to  which  his 
parents  had  attained,  thwarted  by  head  winds,  buf- 
feted by  the  waves,  vexed  by  confused  and  confus- 
ing currents. 

Yet  oh  the  thought,  that  thou  art  safe,  and  he ! 
That  thought  is  joy,  arrive  what  may  to  me. 

Thus,  as  through  the  bars  of  a  prison-house, 
which  the  theology  of  his  day  had  built  around 
him,  —  a  magnificent  and  terrible  structure,  for  as 
an  artist  Calvin  is  comparable  only  to  Michael  An- 
gelo,  —  we  seem  to  hear  a  spirit  in  touch  with  the 
heart  of  Christianity.  So,  in  his  hymns,  there  is  to 
be  caught  now  and  then  this  same  note  of  possible 
but  scarcely  to  be  expected  joy. 

Sometimes  a  light  surprises 
The  Christian  while  he  sings ; 

*  Cf.  Stephen,  Essays  in  Ecclesiastical  Biography,  ii,  99-121  ; 
Oliphant,  Literary  History  of  Englandf  i,  43-49. 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  43 

It  is  the  Lord  who  rises 

With  healing  in  his  wings  ; 
WTien  comforts  are  declining, 

He  grants  the  soul  again 
A  season  of  clear  shining, 

To  cheer  it  after  rain.^ 

It  IS  like  honest  Thomas  translated  from  the 
first  into  the  eighteenth  century,  —  a  man  who 
forecast  evil,  but  whom  blessing  always  surprised. 
Yet  it  would  be  very  misleading  to  suppose  that 
the  note  of  religious  melancholy  is  dominant  in 
Cowper's  poetry.  The  faith  which  it  voices  is  gen- 
erally calm  and  strong,  if  not  robust.  Sometimes 
it  approaches  the  dogmatic,  as  in  the  celebrated 
lines  upon  "  Voltaire  and  the  Lace-Worker,"  who 

Just  knows,  and  knows  no  more,  her  Bible  true  — 
A  truth  the  brilliant  Frenchman  never  knew ; 
And  in  that  charter  reads,  with  sparkling  eyes, 
Her  title  to  a  treasure  in  the  skies. 

There  is  also  a  passage  in  "  Hope  "  presaging  in 
notably  vigourous  verse  the  great  missionary  adven- 
ture which  was  to  characterize  the  next  century. 

That  sound  bespeaks  salvation  on  her  way, 
The  trumpet  of  a  life-restoring  day ; 
'T  is  heard  where  England's  eastern  glory  shines, 
And  in  the  gulfs  of  her  Cornubian  mines. 
And  still  it  spreads.  See  Germany  send  forth 
Her  sons  to  pour  it  on  the  frozen  north ; 

*  This  hymn  has  sometimes  been  ascribed  to  Newton,  but  prob- 
ably only  because  it  is  to  be  found  in  tbe  volume  of  Olney  Hymns. 
The  evidence  for  Cowper's  authorship  seems  conclusive. 


M  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Fired  with  a  zeal  peculiar,  they  defy 
The  rage  and  rigour  of  a  polar  sky, 
And  plant  successfully  sweet  Sharon's  rose 
On  icy  plains  and  in  eternal  snows. 

A  spark  of  adventure  glowed  in  the  poet's  soul  to 
which  the  heroism  of  the  Moravians  sent  back  a 
kindred  gleam.  He  was  a  diligent  and  delighted 
reader  of  books  of  travel,  speaking  somewhere  in 
his  letters  of  how  wide  the  range  of  his  vicarious 
wandering  had  been ;  and  everywhere  he  carried 
his  love  of  God,  together  with  a  devoted  but  can- 
did patriotism. 

England,  with  all  thy  faults,  I  love  thee  still, 

is  a  line  not  less  characteristic  than  noble. 

It  is  indeed  in  this  atmosphere  of  candour  and 
courage,  warmed  and  sweetened  by  faith,  hope, 
and  love,  lightened  by  the  play  of  keen  yet  kindly 
humour,  and  invigourated  by  an  ever-present  rev- 
erence for  duty,  that  the  genuine  religious  element 
in  Cowper's  work  is  to  be  found.  The  explicit  piety 
is  never  to  be  overlooked  as  a  natural  expression 
of  religious  sentiment ;  but  the  implicit  reverence 
for  all  good  things  and  sympathy  with  all  right 
endeavour  is  the  main  evidence  of  it.  "  Is  not '  The 
Task'  a  glorious  poem?"  enquired  Robert  Burns, 
who  knew  what  pure  and  undefiled  religion  was, 
however  half-hearted  his  own  attempts  to  incarnate 
it  may  sometimes  have  been.  "The  religion  of  ^The 
Task/  bating  a  few  scraps  of  Calvinistic  divinity, 
is  the  religion  of  God  and  Nature;  the  religion 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  45 

that  exalts,  that  ennobles  man."  *  No  less  competent 
a  judge  and  notable  an  heretic  than  George  Eliot 
pays  similar  and  even  more  explicit  tribute  to  the 
same  poem.  "  Where,"  she  asks,  "  is  the  poem 
that  surpasses  the  '  Task '  in  the  genuine  love  it 
breathes,  at  once  towards  inanimate  and  animate 
existence  — in  truthfulness  of  perception  and  sin- 
cerity of  presentation  —  in  the  calm  gladness  that 
springs  from  a  delight  in  objects  for  their  ovm 
sake,  without  self -reference  —  in  divine  sympathy 
with  the  lowliest  pleasures,  with  the  most  short- 
lived capacity  for  pain.  .  .  .  No  object  is  too  small 
to  prompt  his  song  —  not  the  sooty  film  on  the 
bars,  or  the  spoutless  teapot  holding  a  bit  of 
mignonette  that  serves  to  cheer  the  dingy  town 
lodging  with  a  '  hint  that  Nature  lives ' ;  and  yet 
his  song  is  never  trivial,  for  he  is  alive  to  small  ob- 
jects, not  because  his  mind  is  narrow,  but  because 
his  glance  is  clear  and  his  heart  is  large."  ^ 

There  is  profit  in  setting  these  judgements  of  two 
persons  whose  critical  competence  in  literary  matters 
will  not  be  lightly  questioned  beside  the  dictum  of 
the  historian  of  the  Evangelical  Revival. 

"  It  would  be  scarcely  claiming  too  much,"  says 
Canon  Overton,  "if  we  set  down  the  whole  of 
Cowper's  original  poetry  ...  as  belonging  to  the 
literature  of  the  Evangelical  Revival.  ...  In  the 

*  Letter  to  Mrs.  Dunlop,  Dec.  25,  1793  ;  Robert  Bums  and  Mrs. 
Dunlopf  ii,  265. 

'  Essay  on  Worldliness  and  Other-Worldliness. 


4»  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

productions  of  his  elegant  pen  we  should,  under 
any  circumstances,  have  recognized  at  least  the 
disjecta  membra  i^oetce.  But,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
his  Christian  convictions  were  the  mainspring  which 
set  the  whole  machinery  of  his  poetical  work  in 
motion.  It  was  this  which  gave  coherence  and 
symmetry  and  soul  to  it  all.  Abstract  the  religious 
element  from  his  compositions,  and  they  all  fall  to 
pieces ;  but,  in  fact,  it  is  impossible  to  do  so.  With 
the  exception  of  one  or  two  lighter  pieces,  there  is 
an  undercurrent  of  Christian  sentiment  running 
through  and  inseparable  from  them  all."  ^ 

No  doubt  the  question  has  arisen  in  some  minds 
as  to  the  source  of  Cowper's  delightful  sense  of 
humour,  and  the  legitimacy  of  its  association  with 
his  profound  religious  convictions  on  the  one  hand 
and  his  haunting  melancholy  upon  the  other.  The 
association  between  humour  and  melancholy  is  nat- 
ural enough,  since  the  latter  may  be  said  to  be  lit- 
tle more  than  the  former  hypertrophied  and  passed 
into  an  obsession.  '  A  sense  of  humour,'  as  I  shall 
have  occasion  to  note  at  some  length  in  a  later 
chapter,  is  but  a  phrase  for  a  keen  appreciation  of 
life's  little  incongruities  and  a  disposition  to  hold 
them  resolutely  subject  to  a  larger  plan.  The  hu- 
mourous man  consents  to  be  amused  and  desires  to 
amuse  others  by  casual  attention  bestowed  upon 
small  interruptions  of  the  normal  order  of  his 
thought  or  of  his  day,  especially  when  an  element 

^  Evangelical  Revival  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  p.  127. 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  47 

of  the  unexpected  or  the  absurd  appears  in  them. 
Most  good-tempered  people  know  what  it  is  to 
meet  a  succession  of  insignificant  contretemps,  at 
the  first  and  second  of  which  they  are  disposed  to 
give  way  to  vexation;  but  as  the  number  grows, 
the  sense  of  being  in  a  ^plight'  grows,  too.  If 
the  plight  be  merely  absurd,  victory  over  threat- 
ened sourness  of  temper  is  won  with  an  honest 
laugh  at  one's  self.  If  it  be  serious,  the  disturbance 
of  mind  may  deepen  into  melancholy.  When  the 
incongruities  of  life  come  to  be  regarded  as  ironies, 
purposeful  and  cruel  contradictions  of  fate,  then 
the  sense  of  humour  atrophies  and  practically  dies ; 
as  witness  the  later  novels  of  Mr.  Hardy,  from 
which  all  the  radiance  of  humour  which  illuminated 
'*'  Far  from  the  Madding  Crowd"  and  "  Under  the 
Greenwood  Tree "  seems  to  have  evaporated.  The 
reason  is  that,  when  all  life's  little  incongruities 
have  become  signs  of  Fate's  malevolence,  the  Uni- 
verse grows  too  grim  for  laughter  or  for  that  quiet 
amusement  which  is  even  better.  Indeed,  in  such 
circumstances,  one  no  longer  has  a  right  to  speak 
of  the  Universe,  since  cosmos  has  given  place  to 
chaos  once  again.  Humour  of  a  sane,  good-tem- 
pered, gracious  sort  is  indissolubly  hnked  to  faith. 
It  need  not,  of  course,  be  a  perfectly  coordinated 
or  confessed  faith ;  but  the  relation  is  sufficiently 
close,  define  it  as  we  may,  to  leave  wholesome  mirth 
without  support  or  stay  when  faith  in  God  and  man 
is    overthrown.    Illustrations  of  this  will  not  be 


48  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

wanting  as  we  go  on  together.  It  is  sufficient  now 
to  note  the  fact  that  Cowper's  humour,  evident 
enough  in  his  verse,  but  shining  with  an  effulgence 
of  perpetual  delight  in  his  letters,  belongs  to  his 
faith.^ 

Of  course  this  is  only  another  way  of  saying  that 
he  was  gifted  with  a  fine  and  true  sense  of  propor- 
tion, doing  all  things,  when  he  was  himself,  de- 
cently and  in  order.  Thus  he  was  able  to  dignify 
little  matters  and  commonplace  occurrences  into 
proper  subjects  for  verse,  introducing  thereby  a  new 
note  into  the  poetry  of  his  century.  The  thing  has 
perhaps  never  been  better  put  than  by  Anne  Grant 
in  a  letter  written  some  five  and  twenty  years  after 
the  poet's  death.  "  Yet  there  are  blockheads  .  .  . 
that  will  say,  '  What  do  the  public  care  for  his 
stockings,  or  for  his  oysters,  or  for  the  cake  that 
came  in  its  native  pans,  or  the  heartless  hens  that 
refused  to  lay  eggs  to  make  another  cake?'  I 
would  have  such  persons  know  that  a  Cowper  mov- 
ing in  the  light  of  his  mental  beauty  and  modest 
sanctity  irradiates  every  object  that  is  in  contact 
with  him ;  it  is  their  oysters  and  cakes  that  are  in- 
significant, because  they  are  so  themselves."  ^ 

*  I  do  not  forget  the  late  T.  E.  Brown's  strictures  upon  what  he 
is  pleased  to  think  Cowper's  tendency  to  sit  in  Pharisaical  judge- 
ment upon  those  who  differed  from  him;  but  that  gifted  Manxman's 
equal  capacity  for  prejudice  and  strong  language  practically  rules 
him  out  of  court  in  such  a  case  as  this. 

2  Memoir  and  Correspondence  of  Anne  Grant.  Quoted  from  Moul- 
ton's  Library  of  Literary  Criticism,  iv,  p.  383. 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  49 

A  century  of  letters  bears  testimony  to  the  sig- 
nificance of  Cowper's  life  and  work.  He  reintro- 
duced in  a  perfectly  simple  and  natural  manner  the 
religious  note  into  literature.  He  became  the  inspi- 
ration of  more  than  one  later  poet,  as  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing's "  Cowper's  Grave/'  and  the  passionate  verses 
of  Anne  Bronte  testify.  More  than  this,  he  became 
the  accepted  poet  of  the  English  Evangelicals,  bring- 
ing sweetness  and  light  into  many  middle-class 
English  homes  where  reawakened  piety,  threatening 
to  degenerate  into  a  new  asceticism,  needed  him 
sorely  enough.  To  become  the  poet  of  a  school  or 
sect  is  one  of  the  severest  tests  to  which  an  author 
can  be  put.  It  is  significant  of  the  genuine  quality 
of  Cowper's  poetic  gift  and  the  soundness  of  his 
piety  that  practically  all  his  verses  still  ring  clear 
and  true ;  and  that  we  would  not  sacrifice  even 
such  tragic  lines  as  those  wrung  out  of  his  despair 
by  the  story  of  Anson's  sailor  swept  overboard  in 
mid-ocean  to  a  fate  which  seemed  but  a  mild  pre- 
sage of  his  own.  There  is  perhaps  no  sadder  stanza 
in  EngHsh  poetry  than  — 

No  voice  divine  the  storm  allay'd, 

No  light  propitious  shone, 
When  snatched  from  all  effectual  aid. 

We  perished,  each  alone  ; 
But  I  beneath  a  rougher  sea, 

And  whelm'd  in  deeper  gulfs  than  he.^ 

The  voice  is  Cowper's  and  the  hand  that  wrote  was 

*  Poems,  X,  98,  Southey's  edition. 


50  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

his ;  but  the  inspirer  of  the  verse  was  that  strange 
spirit  of  despair  who  plagued  him  for  so  long,  cast- 
ing him,  like  the  demoniac  of  old,  into  the  water 
and  the  fire,  and  forcing  him,  in  efforts  to  rid  him- 
self of  such  possession,  to  perform  some  of  the  most 
significant  and  telling  work  of  his  own  century ; 
work  which  was  destined  moreover  to  prove  to  be 
an  emancipation  proclamation  to  the  next. 

A  well-known  critic  not  long  since  began  a  re- 
view of  the  poet  whom  we  are  next  to  consider  with 
the  words,  "We  are  done  with  Crabbe."  He  very 
likely  intended  to  state  a  lamentable  fact  rather 
than  a  judgement ;  otherwise  the  phrase  would  de- 
serve to  be  pilloried  beside  the  "  This  will  never 
do,"  wherewith  Jeffrey  greeted  Wordsworth.  Even 
as  a  statement  of  fact,  however,  one  may  take  issue 
with  Professor  Woodberry's  dictum ;  for  there  is 
scarce  a  poet  of  his  century  whose  keenness  of  ob- 
servation, sense  of  human  values,  and  conscious- 
ness of  what  we  rather  blindly  call  '  the  Social 
Question,'  render  him  so  germane  to  our  own  day 
as  this  "Pope  in  worsted  stockings."  Some  one  has 
sketched  his  sturdy  figure  as  in  old  age  he  came  in 
from  a  botanizinor  excursion  with  his  hands  full  of 
wayside  flowers  or  weeds.  Nothing  could  be  more 
significant  or  characteristic  than  those  weeds  in 
Crabbe's  firm  and  sympathetic  grasp.  There  was  no 
touch  of  sentimentality  in  the  interest  which  they 
aroused ;  but  they  grew  beside  his  path ;  there  was 
meaning,  explicit  or  latent,  in  them ;  and  Crabbe 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  51 

cared.  He  cared  to  know  what  they  were ;  to  inquire 
into  the  bane  or  blessing  of  which  they  were  capa- 
ble; it  may  be  that  he  cared  just  because  other  peo- 
ple did  not  seem  to  care.  That  at  least  appears 
often  to  have  been  his  principle  of  selection  in  choos- 
ing the  subjects  for  his  poems.  Life's  highways  and 
hedges  furnished  him  with  tragedy  and  comedy  — 
though  with  far  more  of  the  former  than  the  latter. 
Crabbe  knew  the  lot  of  the  poor  at  first  hand. 
Bred  to  drudgery  in  a  little  east-coast  fishing  town, 
and  later  apprenticed  to  a  surgeon  or  apothecary, 
his  first  attempts  to  get  on  in  the  world  met  with 
bitter  discouragement.  His  rash  adventure  in  at- 
tempting London  life  with  little  more  than  the  tra- 
ditional shilling  in  his  pocket,  was  an  invitation  to 
disaster  ;  and  irretrievable  disaster  might  have  come 
had  it  not  been  for  the  aid  of  Edmund  Burke  in 
his  extremity.  None  of  that  great  man's  good  deeds 
becomes  him  better  than  the  help  he  gave  this 
struggling  poet.  Crabbe  finally  took  orders  and  be- 
came a  diligent,  if  not  a  zealous,  minister  of  the 
Church  of  England.  His  "  Village,"  which  is  far  re- 
moved from  Goldsmith's  "  Sweet  Auburn,"  and  the 
"  Parish  Register  "  give  us  a  picture  of  the  pathos 
and  tragedy  of  humble  life  worth  setting  beside  the 
great  work  of  his  contemporary  Sir  Frederick  Eden 
on  "  The  State  of  the  Poor."  Even  in  his  later 
poems,  like  "  Tales  of  the  Hall,"  in  which  he  seems 
to  deal  with  the  more  fortunate  classes,  Crabbe  is 
still  keen  to  perceive  and  quick  to  sympathize  with 


62  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

poverty.  When  the  two  brothers  who  are  the  pro- 
tagonists of  the  simple  drama  approach  their  meet- 
ing after  many  years  of  separation,  the  younger 
soliloquizes :  — 

"  How  shall  I  now  my  unknown  way  explore, 
He  proud  and  rich  —  I  very  proud  and  poor  ?  " 

When  they  have  met,  grown  accustomed  to  each 
other,  and  sit  at  ease  over  wine  and  walnuts  in  the 
elder's  well-appointed  dining-room,  the  talk  recurs  to 
old  schoolmates  or  village  acquaintances  who  have 
felt  the  world's  rough  hand.  There  is  no  blemish 
of  condescension  or  patronage.  All  is  direct,  simple, 
and  honestly  sympathetic,  as  well  as  sane  with  a 
sanity  which  will  not  permit  a  trace  of  false  senti- 
ment. The  tears  in  the  story  of  Kuth  are  genuine 
lachrymoB  rerum ;  and  nothing  could  be  truer  to 
life  than  the  narrative  of  the  poor  boy  of  moderate 
talent,  patronized  and  partly  educated  by  a  noble- 
man who  cast  him  off  when  the  youth  began  to 
think  himself  a  genius  and  to  nurse  an  ambition 
for  an  artist's  career. 

Years  passed  away,  and  where  he  lived,  and  how, 

"Was  then  unknown  —  indeed  we  know  not  now ; 

But  once  at  twilight  walking  up  and  down. 

In  a  poor  alley  of  the  mighty  town, 

Where,  in  her  narrow  courts  and  garrets,  hide 

The  grieving  sons  of  Genius,  Want  and  Pride, 

I  met  him  musing :  sadness  I  could  trace. 

And  conquer'd  hope's  meek  anguish,  in  his  face.^ 

It  is  doubtful  if  our  speech  contains  another  phrase 

*  Tales  of  the  Hall,  book  iii. 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  53 

SO  competent  to  sum  up  the  tragedy  of  ambitious 
and  disappointed  mediocrity  as  that  "conquer'd 
hope's  meek  anguish." 

Crabbe's  poetry,  it  will  be  seen,  is  not  exactly 
diverting  according  to  modern  standards,  —  though 
he  was  a  chief  favourite  with  such  potent  lords  of 
literature  as  Byron,  Scott,  and  Newman,  —  but  it  is 
none  the  less  interesting  and  profitable  for  any  one 
who  would  know  the  world  in  which  he  lives  and 
who  would  grapple  with  the  problem  of  its  inequali- 
ties of  privilege.  It  is  religious  in  the  deep  sense 
in  which  the  prophecy  of  Amos  or  the  parable  of 
Dives  and  Lazarus  may  be  called  religious ;  and  it 
shares  their  convicting  power.  Even  at  this  dis- 
tance it  is  hard  to  read  the  story  of  the  Village 
Workhouse,  with  its  portrayal  — 

Of  the  cold  charities  of  man  to  man,  — 

or  the  sketch  of  Isaac  Ashford  in  the  "Parish 
Register,"  without  an  awakening  of  the  ^social 
conscience ' ;  or,  let  it  be  added,  an  honest  thanks- 
giving that  we  have  made  some  progress  in  the 
intervening  century.  Ashford  is  a  noble  and  pa- 
thetic figure  which  none  but  a  country  clergyman 
could  have  drawn.  Although  his  life  had  been  one 
of  strict  and  industrious  integrity,  — 

At  length  he  found,  when  seventy  years  were  run, 
His  strength  departed  and  his  labour  done ; 
When  he,  save  honest  fame,  retained  no  more, 
But  lost  his  wife,  and  saw  his  children  poor : 
'T  was  then,  a  spark  of  —  say  not  discontent  — 
Struck  on  his  mind,  and  thus  he  gave  it  vent :  — 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"  Kind  are  your  laws  ('t  is  not  to  be  denied), 
That  in  yon  House,  for  ruin'd  age,  provide, 

Why  then  this  proud  reluctance  to  be  fed, 
To  join  your  poor  and  eat  the  parish-bread  ?  " 


Such  were  his  thoughts,  and  so  resign'd  he  grew ; 
Daily  he  placed  the  Workhouse  in  his  view !  ^ 

Grave  economic  objections  can  be  made  against 
any  general  scheme  of  old-age  pensions ;  American 
experience  with  military  pensions  leads  even  the 
friendly  critic  to  look  askance  at  the  system  just 
inaugurated  in  Great  Britain ;  but  those  of  its  ad- 
vocates who  know  their  Crabbe  will  never  lack  a 
telling  argument;  nor  will  their  opponents  fail  to 
discover  a  considerable  burden  of  proof  laid  upon 
their  shoulders  whenever  they  are  called  upon  to 
face  Isaac  Ashf ord.  He  helps  us  to  understand  what 
Tennyson  meant  when,  in  expressing  his  liking  for 
Crabbe,  he  said,  "  There  is  a  tramp,  tramp,  tramp, 
a  merciless  sledge-hammer  thud  about  his  lines 
which  suits  his  subjects." 

The  moment  that  we  turn  to  Burns  all  this  is 
changed,  though  the  change  is,  after  all,  of  manner 
rather  than  of  matter.  One  may  advance  this  claim 
without  forgetting  that  in  literature,  and  especially 
in  poetry,  manner  is  much,  and  that  in  passing 
from  Crabbe  to  Burns  we  seem  to  master  a  new 
element  and  to  spring  from  earth  to  air.  Crabbe 
was  a  realist  and  inspired  to  plod,  though  after 

^  The  Parish  Register,  part  iii. 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  56 

such  a  fashion  that  something  of  the  beauty  and 
terror  of  an  army  with  banners  attends  his  march. 
Burns  was  inspired  to  sing  and  fly,  and  is  most 
master  of  himself  as  well  as  of  his  art  while  exer- 
cising his  lyric  gift. 

Never  perhaps  has  a  great  poet  revealed  himself 
so  unreservedly  in  his  verse.  Except  for  the  fact 
that  much  which  the  world  has  seen  was  never 
meant  for  its  eye,  but  written  for  himself  alone,  as 
his  brother  Gilbert  assures  us,  whole  sections  of  his 
poetry  would  scarce  be  endurable.  As  it  is,  the 
reader  not  infrequently  sympathizes  with  Keats, 
who  shrank  from  such  excess  of  self-revelation 
while  he  felt  its  fascination  to  the  full.  "  We  can 
see  horribly  clear  in  the  work  of  such  a  man,"  he 
wrote  in  one  of  his  letters,  "  his  whole  life  as  if  we 
were  God's  spies." 

That  life  is  too  well  known  to  require  any  sketch 
of  its  incidents  here.  It  reminds  us  anew  of  the 
mysterious  catholicity  which  the  Spirit  of  all  Truth 
exercises  in  the  choice  of  his  instruments,  using 
sometimes  the  weak,  sometimes  the  obdurate,  and 
always  the  partial.  Burns  was  as  far  as  possible 
from  being  obdurate  or  stubborn ;  but  he  was  weak, 
and  the  manliness  which  is  one  of  his  noblest  and 
sweetest  characteristics  sometimes  failed  him  lam- 
entably. To  claim  that  "The  Cottar's  Saturday 
Night"  represents  his  best  gift  to  literature  might 
lay  me  open  to  the  accusation  of  subordinating  criti- 
cal faculty  to  the  convenience  of  my  present  theme. 


66  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Yet  the  testimony  of  no  less  a  critic  than  Scott's 
biographer  can  be  cited  for  the  defence.  Lockhart 
is  very  confident  that  the  loss  of  this  one  poem 
would  be  perhaps  the  most  serious  that  the  poet's 
fame  could  endure,  were  such  loss  possible.  The 
reader  needs  but  to  recall  it  to  feel  how  representa- 
tive it  is  of  the  best  in  Burns's  experience  and  how 
profound  and  genuine  was  the  religious  feeling 
which  inspired  it.  In  his  sanest  moments  there 
never  was  a  saner  man.  He  knew  where  the  hidings 
of  Scotland's  power  lay,  and  whence  the  source  of 
his  own  largest  opportunities  came  —  out  of  the 
sturdy,  independent,  godly  training  received  from 
his  parents,  and  which  was  in  a  sense  characteristic 
of  the  Scots  Presbyterian  peasantry.  That  training 
in  self-respecting  manliness,  with  the  Scriptures  and 
the  Shorter  Catechism  to  vouch  for  its  validity, 
Burns  never  forgot.  When  at  his  best,  he  generally 
echoes  the  spirit  of  it.  To  be  sure,  — 

He  feels  the  force, 
The  treacherous  undertow  and  stress, 
Of  wayward  passions,  and  no  less 

The  keen  remorse. 

At  moments,  wrestling  with  his  fate, 
His  voice  is  harsh,  but  not  with  hate  ; 

The  brushwood  hung 
Above  the  tavern  door  lets  fall 
Its  bitter  leaf,  its  drop  of  gall, 

Upon  his  tongue. 

But  still  the  music  of  his  song 
Rises  o'er  all,  elate  and  strong ; 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  57 

Its  master  chords 
Are  Manhood,  Freedom,  Brotherhood  ; 
Its  discords  but  an  interlude 

Between  the  words.^ 

As  SO  often  happens  in  both  literature  and  life, 
the  religious  element  in  Burns  shows  to  best  advan- 
tage when  it  is  implicit.  He  hated  hypocrisy,  and, 
like  many  a  conscience-smitten  man,  exalted  his 
hatred  into  a  special  virtue.  "  Holy  Willie's  Prayer," 
for  instance,  is  a  diatribe  acrid  enough  to  have  come 
from  the  pen  of  Churchill  or  of  Junius.  It  is  an 
attack  upon  ultra-Calvinism  in  general,  —  which  was 
sufficiently  justifiable ;  and  upon  a  certain  William 
Fisher  in  particular,  —  which  nothing  could  justify. 
So  in  the  "  Holy  Fair,"  with  its  innuendoes  and 
personalities,  there  is  far  less  Christian  spirit  than 
in  the  rollicking  stanzas  of  the  "  Jolly  Beggars,"  a 
poem  which  for  genuine  inspiration  must  take  pre- 
cedence of  the  far  more  famous  "  Tam  o'  Shanter." 
But  the  "Lines  to  a  Mountain  Daisy,"  to  the  mouse 
whose  poor  home  was  invaded  by  his  ploughshare, 
the  closing  stanzas  of  his  "  Address  to  the  Unco 
Guid,"  and  especially  — 

A  man's  a  man  for  a'  that 

are  instinct  with  the  very  spirit  of  the  Gospel.  Some- 
where this  man 

^  H.  W.  Longfellow,  Robert  Bums. 

As  originally  printed  in  Harper^ s  Magazine  for  1880, the  last  stanza 
began,— 

But  still  the  burden  of  his  song 
Is  love  of  right,  disdain  of  wrong. 


68  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

learned  the  touch  that  speeds 
Right  to  the  natural  heart  of  things ; 
Struck  rootage  down  to  where  Life  feeds 
At  the  eternal  Springs. 

It  is  not  without  hesitation  that  one  writes  down 
William  Blake  as  a  mystic ;  not  but  that  mysticism 
of  a  sort  played  a  part  in  his  strange  mental  and 
spiritual  experience,  but  because  we  have  fallen  into 
the  notion  that  such  experience  is  typical  of  mysti- 
cism. The  genuine  mystic  is  simply  a  person  of 
keen  spiritual  perceptions  to  whom  the  Immanent 
Soul  of  the  Universe  seems  very  near  and  real.  He 
looks  askance  at  trances  on  the  one  hand,  as  he 
extends  but  a  dubious  welcome  to  rituals  upon 
the  other,  and  always  he  is  suspicious  of  hysteria, 
though  possibly  willing  to  admit  that  life  subject 
to  hysterical  seizures  is  better  than  stark  death. 
The  genuine  mystical  element  in  Blake  consists  in 
his  God-consciousness  rather  than  in  his  tendency 
to  dream  dreams,  to  see  visions,  and  to  babble  with 
tongues.  His  claim  to  sanity  may  be  questioned  ;  so 
may  his  claim  to  the  possession  of  the  clear  flame  of 
genius ;  yet  sparks  of  genius  illumine  his  work  both 
in  literature  and  art.  He  has  aroused  some  enthusi- 
asms and  inspired  some  disciples — at  least  to  ap- 
propriate his  ideas.  He  was  a  man  of  weird  visions, 
ecstasies,  and  revelations,  which  were  never  quite 
plain  to  him  and  which  he  could  therefore  never 
adequately  reveal  to  others.  Possessed  as  he  was 
by  a  sort  of  religious  demon,  he  wrote  some  poetry 


THE  DAWN  OF  THE  NEW  DAY  59 

and  made  some  drawings  which  are  wonderfully 
suggestive  in  their  partial  and  inchoate  state ;  and 
he  left  two  or  three  exquisite  lyrics  which  can 
scarcely  fail  of  immortality.  In  the  "Reeds  of 
Innocence "  he  incorporates  with  something  of 
Stevenson's  naturalness  and  simplicity  that  child- 
like spirit  which  is  the  essence  of  religion. 

Piping  down  the  valleys  wild,  • 
Piping  songs  of  pleasant  glee, 

On  a  cloud  I  saw  a  child, 
And  he  laughing  said  to  me : 

"  Pipe  a  song  about  a  Lamb !  " 
So  I  piped  with  merry  cheer. 

"  Piper,  pipe  that  song  again  "  ; 
So  I  piped :  he  wept  to  hear. 

"The  Tyger"  suggests  in  inimitable  phrase  the 
mystery  of  cruelty  and  death  in  Nature. 

Tyger,  Tyger,  burning  bright 
In  the  forests  of  the  night, 
What  immortal  hand  or  eye 
Dare  frame  thy  fearful  symmetry  ? 


When  the  stars  threw  down  their  spears, 
And  watered  Heaven  with  their  tears, 
Did  He  smile  His  work  to  see  ? 
Did  He  who  made  the  Lamb,  make  thee  ? 

Perhaps  the  best  characterization  of  Blake  is  that 
contained  in  the  little  poem  bearing  his  name  by 
James  Thomson. 

He  came  to  the  desert  of  London  town, 
Grey  miles  long ; 


60  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

He  wandered  up  and  he  wandered  down, 

Singing  a  quiet  song. 
He  came  to  the  desert  of  London  town, 

Mirk  miles  broad ; 
He  wandered  up  and  he  wandered  down, 

Ever  alone  with  God. 

Thus,  at  what  may  seem  to  be  somewhat  dispro- 
portionate length,  I  have  sketched  the  dawn  of  the 
new  day  in  English  poetry.  These  four  men,  of  whom 
Cowperand  Crabbe  seem  to  belong  to  the  eighteenth 
century,  as  Burns  and  Blake  do  to  the  nineteenth, 
all  suggest  in  their  different  ways  the  opportunity 
lying  before  the  student  of  the  religious  implications 
of  our  literature,  —  its  religious  implications,  I  re- 
peat, because  in  literature,  as  elsewhere  in  life,  it  is 
the  implicit  religion  which  counts  and  which  finally 
determines  religious  expression. 

Cowper  with  his  keen  eye,  humourous  smile,  and 
tender  heart ;  Crabbe,  the  realist,  — 

Nature's  sternest  painter,  yet  the  best,  — 

(to  quote  again  Lord  Byron's  rather  hackneyed 
tribute),  depicting  life  in  low  and  sombre  lights, 
yet  never  cynically;  Burns,  singing  his  new  song; 
and  Blake,  piping  his  thin  but  haunting  melody, 
all  bear  witness  to  the  ineradicable  influence  of  re- 
ligion upon  literature.  I  am  not  concerned  just  now 
to  attempt  the  definition  of  that  influence,  but  am 
content  to  note  it  as  we  pass  on  to  observe  two  great 
leaders  in  the  literary  achievement  of  the  new  cen- 
tury. 


CHAPTER  m 

SONS    OF   THE    MORNING  :     WORDSWOBTH    AND 
COLERIDGE 

Matthew  Arnold  once  observed  that,  while 
Wordsworth's  poetry  had  failed  of  the  recognition 
it  deserves,  still  it  had  not  wanted  eulogists ;  "  and 
it  may  be  said  to  have  brought  its  eulogists  luck, 
for  almost  every  one  who  has  praised  Wordsworth's 
poetry  has  praised  it  well."  No  better  illustration 
of  the  truth  of  this  remark  could  be  cited  than  the 
filial  and  illuminating  estimate  wherewith  Matthew 
Arnold  himself  prefaced  the  little  volume  of  Words- 
worth selections  edited  by  him  some  five  and  twenty 
years  ago.  It  is  so  sane  and  rare  a  bit  of  criticism 
that  I  could  perhaps  best  attain  my  present  purpose 
by  asking  the  reader  to  renew  acquaintance  with  it, 
and  then  to  draw  his  own  conclusions  concerning 
the  poet's  testimony  to  my  thesis ;  for  it  is  only 
honest  to  confess  that  I  cannot  bring  myself  to 
speak  of  Wordsworth  with  the  detachment  and 
coolness  of  judgement  becoming  to  the  present 
task.  That  very  edition  of  his  poems  is  the  volume 
which,  next  perhaps  to  the  Bible,  Shakespeare,  and 
Boswell's  Johnson,  I  should  choose  to  take  into  ex- 
ile with  me,  unless  indeed  I  threw  discretion  to  the 


62  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

winds,  and  chose  instead  the  poems  which  Matthew 
Arnold  did  not  choose;  since  the  true  Words- 
worth lover  would  not  willingly  give  up  the  "  Pre- 
lude "  and  "  Excursion.'*  I  remember  the  famous 
anecdote  of  Macaulay's  challenge  to  the  company 
of  '  literary  persons '  who  were  praising  the  "  Pre- 
lude," which  resulted  in  the  discovery  that  he  him- 
self was  the  only  man  in  the  room  who  had  read 
the  poem ;  nor  do  I  forget  the  dubious  praise  which 
the  sprightly  Elizabeth,  of  "  German  Garden  "  fame, 
bestows  upon  it  in  her  ''  Adventures  in  Riigen." 
She  commends  it  as  an  ideal  companion  for  the 
traveller,  inasmuch  as  the  reading  can  be  begun  at 
any  point  without  special  effort  and  interrupted 
with  as  little  disappointment.  Both  it  and  the  "  Ex- 
cursion "  are  poems  which  unquestionably  minister 
to  composure  rather  than  to  excitement,  and  doubt- 
less there  have  been  readers  whose  composure 
has  deepened  into  slumber.  Wordsworth  is  not  in- 
frequently prosaic  and  occasionally  commonplace. 
None  but  a  Words worthian  fanatic  —  by  which  I 
mean  that  type  of  devotee  who  seems  bent  upon 
spoiling  poetry  by  making  it  the  theme  of  toilsome 
study,  exaggerated  comment,  and  indiscriminate 
praise ;  the  type  that  is  forever  organizing  '  clubs,' 
and  at  whose  hands  Browning  has  suffered  so  many 
things  —  can  overlook  his  famous  line,  — 

A  Mr.  Wilkinson,  a  clergyman, 

which  another  great  poet  used  to  quote  as  perhaps 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  63 

the  feeblest  in  literature.  He  was  unquestionably 
deficient  in  humour.  He  was  possibly  deficient  in 
passion,  though  such  as  know  him  best  do  not  feel 
the  lack.  But  none  the  less  his  eyes  saw  the  bea- 
tific vision,  — 

Of  truth,  of  grandeur,  beauty,  love  and  hope, 
And  melancholy  fear  subdued  by  faith, 
Of  blessed  consolations  in  distress, 
Of  moral  strength  and  intellectual  power, 
Of  joy  in  widest  commonalty  spread. 

He  had  the  faculty  of  perceiving  the  universal 
significance  of  common  things.  Less  gifted  than  his 
contemporary  Coleridge  in  respect  of  pure  fancy,  his 
imagination  was,  I  believe,  more  exactly  attuned  to 
the  music  of  life  as  it  is  than  that  of  any  other  Eng- 
lish poet  with  the  possible  exception  of  Shakespeare : 

The  still  sad  music  of  humanity, 

Nor  harsh  nor  grating,  though  of  ample  power 

To  chasten  and  subdue. 

One  hesitates  to  quote  again  lines  already  in  such 
danger  of  being  worn  threadbare ;  yet  there  is  some- 
thing about  them  which,  like  great  and  familiar  pas- 
sages of  Scripture,  assures  perennial  renewal  of 
their  youth.  However  hardly  used,  they  seem  com- 
monplace only  in  the  mouths  of  shallow  and  shifty 
persons  whose  main  intellectual  resource  is  the 
catchword  of  a  day ;  restored  to  their  rightful  con- 
text the  floods  of  the  Spirit  once  more  pulse  through 
them  and  their  old  soul-compelling  power  returns. 
To  set  these  well-known  lines  in  the  forefront  of 


64  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Wordsworth's  message  is  not  to  imply  that  either 
his  thinking  or  his  writing  was  mainly  in  a  minor 
key.  The  subdued  and  sombre  has  its  frequent 
place,  but  the  dominant  note  is  that  of  calm  and 
patient  confidence,  —  the  victory  which  overcometh 
the  world  being  his  faith.  Who  else  has  ever  inter- 
preted Nature  with  so  clear  a  perception  of  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  body  and  soul  of  it?  He  de- 
lights in  the  outward  semblance,  in  the  nodding  and 
beckoning  of  the  daffodils  to  the  welcome  Spring, 
and  yet  gains  from  the  meanest  flower  that  blows 
thoughts  too  deep  for  tears.  Thus  Nature  is  never 
divorced  from  life.  It  always  has,  when  rightly  read, 
an  immediate  and  normal  influence  — 

On  that  best  portion  of  a  good  man's  life, 
His  little,  nameless,  unremembered  acts 
Of  kindness  and  of  love. 

Men  who  touch  it  with  the  finger  of  faith  find  it  to 
be  the  very  garment  of  God  whose  hem  shall  heal 
them ;  and  sometimes  it  is  swept  aside  for  a  moment 
in  order  that  the  Eeal  Presence  may  appear.  This  is 

that  blessed  mood, 
In  which  the  burden  of  the  mystery. 
In  which  the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight 
Of  all  this  unintelligible  world. 
Is  lightened  ;  that  serene  and  blessed  mood, 
In  which  the  affections  gently  lead  us  on,  — 
Until,  the  breath  of  this  corporeal  frame 
And  even  the  motion  of  our  human  blood 
Almost  suspended,  we  are  laid  asleep 
In  body  and  become  a  living  soul. 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  66 

Such  is  the  mysticism  of  Wordsworth.  He  sees 
things  as  they  are ;  he  feels  the  common  human 
joys  and  griefs :  the  song  of  the  highland  reaper, 
like  Ruth  of  old  among  the  sheaves;  the  burden 
upon  the  bent  shoulders  of  the  poor  leech-gatherer 
gleaning  a  precarious  hvelihood  from  the  moorland 
pools ;  the  tragedy  of  Michael,  the  pathos  of  which 
appeals  to  the  reader  as  deeper  and  more  compelling 
than  that  of  Enoch  Arden  by  so  much  as  the  story 
itself  lies  more  clearly  within  the  range  of  common 
experience;  the  loneliness  of  the  heath  after  the 
passing  of  the  child  whose  solitary  playground  it 
has  been;  the  haunting  intimations  of  a  higher 
destiny  and  a  richer  life  than  this  world  can  make 
room  for;  and  the  clear  tones  in  which  through  the 
mysteries  of  present  experience  the  voice  of  duty 
speaks,  —  of  all  these  diverse  yet  related  things  he 
is  wonderfully  conscious.  They  belong  together  in 
his  thought,  and  their  unifying  principle  is  the 
Reason  and  the  Love  of  God. 

The  secret  of  Wordsworth  is  not  far  to  seek; 
and  yet,  when  found,  one  is  tempted  to  say  that  its 
full  significance  can  be  appreciated  only  by  those 
whose  experience  has  taught  them  the  charm  as 
well  as  the  ache  of  loneliness.  Whether  this  loneli- 
ness be  that  of  solitude,  or  the  yet  more  poignant 
isolation  sometimes  felt  in  cities  and  strange  assem- 
blies, is  of  no  particular  moment.  Wordsworth's 
poetry  more  frequently  voices  the  former ;  though 
the    sonnet   upon   Westminster   Bridge   breathes 


66  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

something  of  the  latter.  But,  whether  alone  or 
amid  a  throng,  the  poet  always  felt  himself  to  be 
a  living  soul  in  vital  touch  with  the  soul  of  Nature. 
This  is  the  answer,  the  more  than  sufficient  answer, 
to  be  made  to  those  who  talk  of  Wordsworth's 
"pantheism."  No  word  could  well  be  further  from 
expressing  his  religion  and  philosophy.  In  panthe- 
ism the  deity  is  so  identified  with  Nature  that  he 
can  be  said  to  live  only  in  the  visible  activities  of 
the  world  and  to  be  conscious  only  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  man.  Wordsworth  shows  no  trace  of 
sympathy  with  so  narrow  and  partial  a  scheme  of 
thought.  On  the  contrary,  the  great  bulk  of  his 
work  is  so  inspired  by  faith  in  a  Personal  Power 
resident  in  the  world  and  at  work  through  its 
activities,  that  in  a  peculiar  sense  he  stands  related 
at  once  to  the  Greek  with  his  haunting  idea  of 
the  genius  loci,  and  to  the  modern  Christian  re- 
joicing in  his  faith  in  an  Immanent  God. 

In  "The  Excursion"  he  has  set  forth  with  fine 
sympathy  and  discrimination  the  naturalness  of  the 
old  pagan  view  —  which  was,  after  all,  but  partly 
wrong.  Greek  polytheism  was  a  partial  and  inade- 
quate attempt  to  express  the  soul's  instinctive  con- 
sciousness of  the  wealth  of  personal  life  in  the 
Universe.  The  Greeks  felt  that,  wherever  events 
took  place, — especially  notable,  essential,  and  re- 
current events  like  the  sun's  rising,  setting,  and 
stately  progress  through  the  zodiac, — there  was 
an  interplay  of   cause   and   effect  which  bespoke 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  67 

the  presence  of  will.  The  presence  of  will  neces- 
sarily implied  the  presence  of  a  person.  They  were 
right.  The  world  of  law  to  which  we  have  been 
introduced  by  modern  science  is  but  a  restate- 
ment in  terms  of  general  and  scientific  interrela- 
tion of  what  their  mythology  attempted  to  express 
in  terms  of  real  but  unrelated  experience.  They 
ascribed  the  steadfast  glory  and  beneficence  of 
the  sun's  progress  to  Apollo ;  the  phenomena  of  the 
sea  to  the  will  of  Poseidon ;  the  waxing  and  wan- 
ing of  the  moon  to  the  virgin  huntress.  They 
failed  to  be  true  to  the  principle  of  religious  de- 
velopment in  too  completely  isolating  these  divini- 
ties and  swamping  the  deeper  significance  of  their 
religion  in  the  intrigues  and  devices  of  Olympus. 
The  relation  of  events  thus  hinged  upon  the  inter- 
relation of  passionate  and  often  petty  people ;  and 
no  doubt  the  intricacy  of  phenomena  which  appear 
sometimes  to  make  up  a  sort  of  "  cosmic  weather," 
might  lend  some  justification  to  their  scheme.  Sci- 
ence has  resolved  these  contradictions  and  diver- 
sities. She  assures  us  that  there  is  no  room  in 
the  Universe  for  whim  or  prejudice, — no  commit- 
tee of  gods  who  may  agree  upon  a  certain  course, 
or  may  break  up  in  petulant  confusion  and  go 
their  several  ways  to  visit  their  favourites  with 
such  blessing,  and  their  enemies  with  such  bane, 
as  are  possible  to  their  strength  and  cleverness. 
The  cosmic  scheme  of  science  is  one  of  — 

Interdependence,  absolute,  foreseen,  ordained,  decreed. 


68  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

It  tends  to  express  itself  in  the  formulas  of  me- 
chanics ;  its  ideal  is  that  of  a  perfectly  articulated 
machine.  Hence  modern  science  is  contemptuous 
toward  Greek  thought,  and  especially  toward  Greek 
thought  upon  religion.  It  too  often  proceeds  upon 
the  implicit  hypothesis  if  not  the  blatant  dogma 
that  the  Universe  has  no  room  for  personality.  What 
seems  to  be  a  person  is  a  delusion  and  free  will  is  a 
snare. 

Against  such  belittling  of  life  as  this  Words- 
worth resolutely  set  his  face.  The  world  in  which 
he  found  himself  was  more  than  a  dead  machine. 
The  men  and  women  who  inhabited  it  were  more 
than  empty  and  insignificant  phenomena.  The 
foundation  of  his  joy  in  the  goodly  frame  of  earth 
which  he  observed  so  closely  was  laid  in  his  con- 
fidence that  a  Spirit  inhabited  and  pervaded  it.  So 
far  from  being  a  pantheist  in  the  technical  sense, 
he  was  simply  clairvoyant  to  God's  immanence.  His 
child  playing  upon  the  heath  — 

Shall  feel  an  overseeing  power 
To  kindle  or  restrain. 

The  mountain  crags  and  caves  give  similar  testi- 
mony to  his  Wanderer :  — 

Even  in  their  fixed  and  steady  lineaments 
He  traced  an  ebbing  and  a  flowing  mind, 
Expression  ever  varying ! 

Most  notable  of  all,  perhaps,  is  the  passage  in  Book 
IV  of  "  The  Excursion,"  in  which  he  pictures  the 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  69 

child  far  inland,  holding  to  his  ear  the  shell  whose 
murmur  speaks  of  its  bond  of  union  with  the  dis- 
tant sea. 

Even  such  a  shell  the  Universe  itself 
Is  to  the  ear  of  faith. 

It  would  be  wearisome  to  multiply  instances  so 
easily  recalled  by  every  chance  acquaintance  of  the 
poet  whose  reading  has  included  " Tintern  Abbey"; 
but  the  impression  that  personality  is  the  ultimate 
fact  in  a  rational  world  grows  upon  the  reader  as 
he  notes  the  place  which  Wordsworth  gives  to  men 
and  women  in  his  theory  and  practice  of  poetry. 
As  has  been  suggested,  he  was  a  lonely  man. 
The  very  traditions  preserved  among  the  Cumber- 
land peasants  show  him  to  us  in  his  walks  so  ab- 
sorbed in  his  thought  and  art  as  to  be  oblivious 
to  those  about  him.  Like  Mr.  Eapling's  hero,  he 
went  forth  — 

For  to  possess,  in  loneliness, 
The  joy  of  all  the  earth.^ 

But  this  joy  of  the  earth  is  never  quite  perfect  ex- 
cept as  it  is  related  to  the  living  soul.  Wordsworth 
loved  nothing  better  than  some  field  or  heath,  val- 
ley or  mountain,  which,  beautiful  in  itself,  should 
yet  take  on  a  higher  beauty  though  framing  a  soul's 
experience. 

He  was  less  a  poet  of  the  village  than  of  the  iso- 
lated cottage;  of  the  group  of  playing  children 
*  To  ike  True  Romance. 


70  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

than  of  the  lonely  but  contented  girl  upon  her 
heath,  whose  very  ghost,  returning  to  its  old  haunts 
after  her  death. 

Sings  a  solitary  song 
That  whistles  in  the  wind. 

He  rarely  depicts,  except  incidentally,  any  com- 
pany of  workers  in  the  fields,  but  loves  the  shep- 
herd upon  the  hills,  facing  sun  and  storm  with 
equal  mind,  and  the  solitary  reaper  singing  at  her 

work. 

Alone  she  cuts  and  binds  the  grain, 
And  sings  a  melancholy  strain. 

Yet "  melancholy  "  is  too  pronounced  a  word.  There 
is  nothing  sad  in  the  picture.  It  stands  rather  as  a 
perpetual  reminder  of  autumn  sunlight,  wholesome 
toil,  and  honest  contentment.  Let  the  song  of  the 
girl  be  what  it  will,  — 

Perhaps  the  plaintive  numbers  flow 
For  old,  unhappy,  far-off  things, 

And  battles  long  ago : 
Or  is  it  some  more  humble  lay 
Familiar  matter  of  to-day  ? 
Some  natural  sorrow,  loss,  or  pain 
That  has  been,  and  may  be  again  ? 

Still  it  is  as  soothing  as  the  crooning  of  a  child, 
alone  but  happy  in  its  play.  Sometimes,  to  be  sure, 
the  loneliness  is  tragic,  as  in  the  case  of  Michael, 
sitting  lamentably  by  the  unfinished  sheepfold  of 
which  his  only  son  had  laid  the  cornerstone  before 
leaving  home  for  the  city  that  was  to  be  his  ruin ; 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  71 

or  of  Margaret,  in  her  desolate  and  decaying  house 
on  the  wide  common  over  which  her  half-crazed 
eyes  were  strained  in  search  of  the  soldier-husband 
who  did  not  come ;  but  not  less  often  there  is  the 
cheer  of  health  and  heartiness  in  these  pictures. 
The  reader  finds  himself  wondering  whether  a  more 
wholesome  figure  was  ever  painted  than  that  of  the 
old  woodman  in  Book  VII  of  "  The  Excursion," 
the  man  "of  cheerful  yesterdays  and  confident 
to-morrows." 

It  is  significant  that  Wordsworth  not  only  felt 
the  physical  health  of  this  sturdy  soul  but  realized 
that  there  was  a  genuine  spiritual  quality  in  his 
cheerfulness. 

Nor  will,  I  trust,  the  Majesty  of  Heaven 
Reject  the  incense  offered  up  by  him, 
Though  of  the  kind  which  beasts  and  birds  present 
In  grove  or  pasture ;  cheerfulness  of  soul, 
From  trepidation  and  repining  free. 

Even  more  notable  is  the  fashion  in  which  here  and 
always  the  lonely  human  creature  dominates  and 
gives  character  to  the  landscape  in  which  he  is  set. 
For  Wordsworth  the  Soul  remains  to  the  end  the 
significant  thing.  Nature  is  after  all  a  setting  for 
the  life  of  man.  Granting  for  the  moment  that  it  be 
a  machine,  man  is  still  the  pulse  of  it  and  bound  to 
dominate  its  existence  in  increasinsf  measure  ac- 
cording  as  he  cultivates  and  exercises  reason  and 
will.^ 

»  "  She  was  a  Phantom  of  Delight." 


72  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Thus  it  comes  to  pass  that  the  high  ethical  qual- 
ity of  Wordsworth  is  a  natural  outflow  of  his  faith 
in  God  and  man  ;  and  didactic  passages,  when  they 
occur,  are  recognized  as  incidents  in  the  stream  of 
his  song.  The  inspired  peddler  in  "  The  Excursion  " 
sometimes  mounts  the  pulpit,  to  be  sure ;  and  now 
and  then,  as  in  the  "  Parable  for  Fathers,"  the 
generally  sweet  simplicity  of  the  poet  becomes  fairly 
stolid  in  its  persistent  thrusting  of  a  moral  upon 
the  unwilling  reader.  It  is  needless  to  say  that  un- 
imaginative souls  are  not  wanting,  to  whom  these 
occasional  lapses  into  homiletic  prose  have  provided 
weapons  which  it  is  their  delight  to  wield.  Matthew 
Arnold's  witness  to  this  is  that  of  one  who  had 
suffered.  He  is  speaking  of  the  apostrophe  to  edu- 
cation in  the  latter  part  of  "  The  Excursion,"  which 

begins,  — 

O  for  the  coming  of  that  glorious  time 
When,  prizing  knowledge  as  her  noblest  wealth,  etc. 

"  One  can  hear  them  being  quoted,"  he  continues, 
"  at  a  Social  Science  Congress ;  one  can  call  up  the 
whole  scene.  A  great  room  in  one  of  our  dismal 
provincial  towns;  dusty  air  and  jaded  afternoon 
daylight ;  benches  full  of  men  with  bald  heads  and 
women  in  spectacles ;  an  orator  lifting  up  his  face 
from  a  manuscript  written  within  and  without,  to 
declaim  these  lines  of  Wordsworth ;  and  in  the  soul 
of  any  poor  child  of  nature  who  may  have  wandered 
in  thither  an  unutterable  sense  of  lamentation  and 
mourning  and  woe." 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  73 

It  is  not  in  such  passages  as  these  that  Words- 
worth makes  his  deepest  ethical  impress  upon  us. 
His  best  teaching  is  incidental.  His  mind  possessed 
in  a  notable  degree  — 

that  apprehensive  power 
By  which  she  is  made  quick  to  recognize 
The  moral  properties  and  scope  of  things. 

Hence  his  plain  men  and  women  serve  to  find  our 
souls.  Take  for  instance  this  picture  of  three  score 
and  ten :  — 

but  his  was  now 

The  still  contentedness  of  seventy  years. 

Calm  did  he  sit  under  the  wide-spread  tree 

Of  his  old  age ; 

and  put  beside  it  the  beauty  and  serenity  of  the  deaf 
dalesman's  story  as  told  in  Book  VH  of  "  The  Ex- 
cursion." Here  is  a  man  cut  off  from  intercourse 
with  his  fellows  through  infirmity,  who  grew  up  — 

From  year  to  year  in  loneliness  of  soul, 


Yet,  by  the  solace  of  his  own  pure  thoughts 
Upheld,  he  duteously  pursued  the  round 
Of  rural  labours. 

There  is  nothing  sordid  about  the  picture.  The 
daily  drudgery  is  relieved  by  the  companionship  of 
books,  and  the  whole  round  of  himible  life  is  digni- 
fied by  a  resolution  of  soul  which  made  cheerful 
conquest  of  adverse  circumstance. 

"It  is  wholesome  as  maize,"  said  Emerson,  of 
Longfellow's  "Hiawatha."    The   figure  is  apt  to 


74  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Wordsworth's  ethical  teaching.  He  was  not  blind 
to  life's  puzzle  and  contradiction.  In  "  The  Red- 
breast and  the  Butterfly"  appears  a  characteristic 
notice  of  the  problem  of  struggle  and  death  in  Na- 
ture. It  is  the  problem  of  Blake's  "  Tjger,  Tyger," 
yet  with  this  difference,  that  Wordsworth's  hunter 
is  no  fierce  and  bloodthirsty  carnivore,  but  the  most 
gentle  and  neighbourly  of  birds.  He  saw  also,  al- 
though at  some  distance  and  not  too  vividly,  the 
essential  factors  in  the  complicated  social  problem 
of  his  own  and  every  day.  Sometimes  his  comment 
is  dry  and  general,  seasoned  with  a  spice  of  irony, 
as  when  one  of  his  characters  is  robbed  of  "  compe- 
tence, and  her  obsequious  shadow,  peace  of  mind." 
Again,  he  utters  a  clear  and  unmistakeable  note  of 
protest  against  the  intolerable  conditions  of  child- 
labour  in  the  factories  whose  smoke  was  then  begin- 
ning to  blacken  England.  He  was  responsive  to  the 
world-shaking  politics  of  his  day,  and  there  is  a  pas- 
sage in  Book  VII  of  "  The  Excursion  "  which  sets 
forth  the  phenomenon  of  Napoleon,  —  a  plough- 
share rending  the  encrusted  sward  of  an  old  and 
barren  field  in  order  that  new  harvests  might  be 
sown  and  garnered  there,  —  which  is  worth  com- 
parison with  Goethe's  famous  estimate  of  Napoleon 
as  a  daemonic  power,  to  which  I  shall  have  occasion 
to  recur  in  the  next  chapter. 

But  his  clearest  and  most  characteristic  note  was 
sounded  when  he  sang  of  the  progress  which  man 
was  making  in  the  subjugation  of  the  world.  Se- 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  75 

eluded  as  his  own  life  was,  he  yet  watched  with 
keen  interest  the  victories  of  invention  and  the  ad- 
vance in  industrial  arts.  He  did  not  rail  at  the 
changes  in  the  face  of  England,  where  villages 
w^ere  growing  into  cities,  while  the  footpaths  and 
shady  lanes  were  in  process  of  transformation  into 
roads.  More  keen-eyed  and  catholic  than  Ruskin  in 
this  respect,  he  recognized  all  these  to  be  the  bitter- 
sweet incidents  of  genuine  human  growth  and  self- 
fulfilment.  He  could  not  share  the  complacency 
of  those  who  rejoiced  in  these  signs  of  temporal 
prosperity  in  themselves.  Yet  he  exulted,  "  casting 
reserve  away,"  in  man's  mastery  of  the  elementary 
forces  of  nature.  It  was  a  splendid  struggle  which 
his  fellows  were  waging  with  the  powers  of  matter ; 
and  the  victory  seemed  assured  as,  in  increasing 
degree  earth,  air,  and  water  yielded  their  secrets 
and  listened  to  the  commands  of  their  new  over- 
lord. But  —  and  here  the  Wordsworthian  note  re- 
curs and  recurs  again  —  the  victory  over  matter  can 
never  be  genuine  and  complete  until  man  learns  — 

though  late,  that  all  true  glory  rests, 
All  praise,  all  safety,  and  all  happiness. 
Upon  the  moral  law. 

This  is  something  far  more  comprehensive  and 
natural  to  man  than  any  rules  of  conduct  codified 
and  enjoined  upon  him  by  external  authority.  It  is 
the  recognition  of  that  kinship  which  exists  be- 
tween man  and  God,  the  realization  of  the  divine 
image  in  human  life.  Conscience  is  — 


76  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

God's  most  intimate  presence  in  the  soul, 
And  His  most  perfect  image  in  the  world. 

Hence  a  science  which  "  simply  remarking  outward 
things,  with  formal  inference  ends/'  ^  can  never  do 
for  man  all  that  is  needful.  It  can  never  supply 
the  place  even  of  a  partial  and  somewhat  super- 
stitious religion.  Man,  in  spite  of  all,  will  still  per- 
sist in  the  inquiry  as  to  what  he  shall  do  to  be 
saved.  Unless  his  soul  be  fed,  he  will  still  find  him- 
self inadequate  to  the  demands  of  life  and  death. 
These  can  be  met  only  as  he  recognizes  his  relation 
to  God  and  consents  to  do  God's  will.  Having  made 
this  momentous  decision  as  the  law  of  duty  thrusts 
it  upon  him,  his  soul  — 

can  therefore  move 
Through  each  vicissitude  of  loss  and  gain 
Linked  in  entire  complacence  with  her  choice. 

There  can  be  no  question  but  that  Wordsworth 
felt  his  own  mission  as  a  poet  to  be  profoundly  re- 
ligious. He  somewhere  says  that  he  cannot  hope 
for  wide  popularity,  simply  because  nineteen  out  of 
every  twenty  people  are  so  anxious  for  the  consid- 
eration of  society  that  they  have  no  eyes  or  ears  for 
any  other  divinity  ;  while  poetry,  in  his  understand- 
ing of  the  term,  can  never  be  felt  or  rightly  estimated 
^'  without  love  of  human  nature  and  reverence  for 
God."  Thus  it  is  that  in  Wordsworth's  world  — 

*  In  some  editions  of  The  Excursion  these  lines  read,  — 
Where  knowledge,  ill  begtin  in  cold  remark 
On  outward  things,  with  formal  inference  ends. 

Book  iv,  11.  622-623. 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  77 

The  primal  duties  shine  aloft  —  like  stars ; 
The  charities  that  soothe,  and  heal,  and  bless. 
Are  scattered  at  the  feet  of  Man  —  like  flowers. 

The  puzzle  of  genius  which  presents  itself  in 
Burns,  as  we  contrast  his  clearness  of  spiritual 
vision  with  his  defective  manhood,  recurs  in  Cole- 
ridge. It  has  been  said  —  by  Matthew  Arnold,  and 
with  characteristic  incisiveness  and  flippancy  — 
that  Coleridge  had  no  morals ;  and  there  is  just 
truth  enough  in  the  gibe  to  give  it  place  in  the 
world's  none  too  charitable  memory  ;  yet  few  makers 
of  literature  placed  the  nineteenth  century  under  so 
deep  a  debt ;  and  none,  perhaps,  wrought  with  more 
singleness  of  purpose  —  Matthew  Arnold  himself 
being  witness  —  to  discover  and  to  expound  the 
truth  which  lay  at  the  heart  of  the  problems  of  his 
day/  Something  of  this  incoherence  of  life  was 
suggested  in  his  appearance  and  bearing.  The 
splendid  forehead  and  fine  eyes,  the  eloquent  and 
somewhat  sensual  mouth,  together  with  a  nose  too 
small,  as  Hazlitt  quaintly  observed,  to  be  the  rud- 
der to  such  a  face,  all  serve  to  introduce  us  to  a 
man  of  singular  strength  and  feebleness.  This  con- 
trast extended  to  personal  manners  and  to  habits 
of  thought.  The  hands  were  carefully  tended  and 
scrupulously  clean,  but  coat  and  waistcoat  snuff- 
bestrewn.  The  walk  to  and  fro  while  he  talked  was 
so  vigourous  and  incessant  as  to  give  Hood  the  im- 
pression that  he  must  be  qualifying  himself  for  an 
*  Arnold,  Essays  in  Criticism^  "  Joubert." 


78  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

itinerant  preacher  —  and  yet  there  was  a  slight 
shuffle  in  it.  The  talk  itself  was  the  marvel  of  his 
generation, as  it  has  been  of  the  generations  since; 
yet  when  most  inspiring  it  was  rarely  altogether 
comprehensible,  and  even  when  least  comprehensi- 
ble it  did  not  fail  to  be  inspiring.  That  it  was  pro- 
digious in  volume  and  scope  admits  of  no  doubt 
whatever.  "What  do  you  think  of  Dr.  Channing, 
Mr.  Coleridge  ?  "  asked  a  young  neighbour  at  the 
tea-table.  "  Before  entering  upon  that  question, 
sir/'  replied  Coleridge,  with  the  air  of  a  man  be- 
ginning an  evening's  discourse,  "  I  must  put  you 
in  possession  of  my  views,  in  extenso,  on  the  ori- 
gin, progress,  present  condition,  future  likelihoods, 
and  absolute  essence  of  the  Unitarian  controversy, 
and  especially  the  conclusions  I  have  —  upon  the 
whole  —  come  to,  on  the  great  question  of  what 
may  be  termed  the  philosophy  of  religious  differ- 
ence." 

There  is  scarce  any  tribute  to  his  genius  more 
unanswerable  than  the  fact  that  such  a  man  should 
be  remembered  otherwise  than  as  the  most  porten- 
tous of  bores.  He  was,  as  might  have  been  expected, 
but  an  indifferent  husband  and  father ;  yet  clear- 
eyed,  patient,  altogether  admirable  Southey,  upon 
whose  heavy-laden  shoulders  the  care  of  his  family 
rested  for  many  years,  did  not  cease  to  love  him  — 
although  to  be  sure,  he  used  his  well-earned  privi- 
lege of  occasionally  quarrelling  with  him.  He  must 
have  been  the  most  difficult  of  guests ;  but  Words- 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  79 

worth,  who  once  had  him  as  an  inmate  of  his  house 
for  a  year  and  six  months,  could  write,  — 

O  capacious  Soul ! 
Placed  on  this  earth  to  love  and  understand ; 

and  he  remained  with  the  Gilmans  of  Highgate  for 
eighteen  years/ 

This  is  the  man  who  was  recognized  to  be  one  of 
the  great  intellectual  and  spiritual  forces  of  his 
century  by  witnesses  as  diverse  as  Sir  Walter  Scott, 
F.  D.  Maurice,  and  Algernon  Charles  Swinburne. 
As  Principal  Tulloch  put  it,  — 

"  Our  business  is  not  so  much  to  attempt  any 
criticism  of  the  value  of  Coleridge's  thought  as  to 
describe  it  as  a  new  power.  That  it  was  such  a 
power  is  beyond  all  question.  It  is  not  merely  the 
testimony  of  such  men  as  Archdeacon  Hare  and 
John  Sterling,  of  Newman  and  of  John  Stuart 
Mill,  but  it  is  the  fact  that  the  later  streams  of 
religious  thought  in  England  are  all  more  or  less 
coloured  by  his  influence.  They  flow  in  deeper 
and  different  channels  since  he  lived.  Not  only 
are  some  of  these  streams  directly,  traceable  to 
him,  and  said  to  derive  all  their  vitality  from  his 
principles,  but  those  which  are  most  opposed  to  him 
have  been  moulded  more  or  less  by  the  impress  of 
his  religious  genius.  There  was  much  in  the  man 
Coleridge  himself  to  provoke  animadversion ;  there 
may  have  been  aspects  of  his  teaching  that  lend 
themselves  to  ridicule ;  but  if  a  genius  seminal  as 

^  I  shall  be  reminded  that  the  date  of  Wordsworth's  tribute  is 
prior  to  that  of  Coleridge's  visitation ;  but  none  the  less,  in  1805 
Wordsworth  knew  his  man. 


80  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

his  has  been  in  the  world  of  thought  and  of  criti- 
cism as  well  as  poetry,  is  not  to  excite  our  reverence, 
there  is  little  that  remains  for  us  to  reverence  in 
the  intellectual  world.  And  when  literature  regains 
the  higher  tone  of  our  earlier  national  life,  the  tone 
of  Hooker  and  of  Milton,  Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge 
will  be  again  acknowledged,  in  Julius  Hare's  words, 
as  '  a  true  sovereign  of  English  thought.'  He  will 
take  rank  in  the  same  line  of  spiritual  genius.  He 
has  the  same  elevation  of  feeling,  the  same  profound 
grasp  of  moral  and  spiritual  ideas,  the  same  wide 
range  of  vision.  He  has,  in  short,  the  same  love  of 
wisdom,  the  same  insight,  the  same  largeness  — 
never  despising  nature,  or  art,  or  literature  for  the 
sake  of  religion,  still  less  ever  despising  religion 
for  the  sake  of  culture."  ^ 

All  this  is  true ;  and  when  we  attempt  to  measure 
Coleridge's  influence  in  the  field  of  poetry,  as  well 
as  in  that  of  religion  and  philosophy,  the  wonder 
grows.  In  the  Introduction  to  the  "  Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel "  Scott  makes  the  "  acknowledgment 
due  from  the  pupil  to  his  master  " ;  while  to  men 
like  Rossetti,  Coventry  Patmore,  and  Swinburne, 
his  lyric  gift  has  been  a  genuine  brook  in  the  way 
—  the  inspiration  and  refreshment  of  their  song. 
"  The  living  Coleridge,"  says  Mr.  Dykes  Campbell, 
"was  ever  his  own  apology,  —  men  and  women 
who  neither  shared  nor  ignored  his  shortcomings, 
not  only  loved  him,  but  honoured  and  followed 
him." 

*  TuUoch,  Movements  of  Religious  Thought  in  Britain,  pp.  7-8. 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  81 

Coleridge  still  lives  not  merely  in  his  poetry  but 
in  works  in  criticism,  philosophy,  and  religion.  We 
do  not  often  take  the  "  Aids  to  Keflection ''  or  "  The 
Confessions  of  an  Inquiring  Spirit"  from  their 
shelves  and  sit  down  with  them  to-day,  —  it  were 
better  perhaps  for  our  faith  and  conduct  if  we  did, 
—  but,  however  thick  the  dust  may  He  upon  the 
books  themselves,  their  doctrine  is  as  valid  as  ever, 
and  we  are  unconsciously  absorbing  the  best  of  it 
through  other  channels. 

What  is  this  doctrine  ?  In  a  word  I  am  tempted 
to  call  it  the  doctrine  of  God  as  a  living  spiritual 
Presence  in  the  world,  and  of  a  "  genial  mind  "  in 
man.  I  use  that  phrase  because  it  is  Coleridge's 
own.  He  bespeaks  a  "  genial  mind "  for  every 
reader  or  would-be  critic  of  the  Bible,  and  means 
thereby  that  Scripture  will  never  reveal  itself  except 
to  the  man  who  approaches  it  vitally  and  generously. 
As  a  record  of  human  experience  it  is  not  suscepti- 
ble of  merely  mechanical  treatment.  Like  men  of  a 
true  sort,  it  welcomes  candour  but  deserves  sym- 
pathy. So  the  divine  element  in  life  is  latent  and 
hidden  except  to  the  man  of  an  "  understanding 
heart."  However  ill  Coleridge  exemplified  some  of 
his  own  doctrines,  faith  and  practice  were  corre- 
spondent in  this  matter  of  a  genial  mind.  It  was  he, 
for  instance,  who  saw  the  significance  of  German 
learning  for  English  thought,  and  who,  better  still, 
interpreted  it  constructively.  The  great  difficulty 
with  many  of  the  results  of  Continental  speculation 


82  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  philosophy  and  theology  as  they  have  found 
their  way  to  England  and  America  is  that  they  have 
been  imported  bodily,  and  upon  arrival  have  been 
gorged  so  greedily  —  their  value  seeming  to  have 
been  artificially  enhanced  by  their  crossing  of  the 
sea  —  as  to  preclude  the  possibility  of  digestion. 
Now  there  is,  or  at  least  there  was,  enough  differ- 
ence between  the  English  and  the  German  habit  to 
make  such  a  process  fruitful  of  almost  as  much 
ill  as  good.  For  years  Englishmen  and  Americans 
were  slow  to  understand  the  real  significance  of 
German  work.  Especially  when  dealing  with  the 
most  sacred  themes  the  German  attitude  and  method 
of  approach  filled  them  with  a  doubt  which  tended 
toward  panic.  This  is  to  be  seen  very  notably  in  the 
work  of  such  a  forerunner  of  the  Oxford  Move- 
ment as  Hugh  James  Rose,  and  to  a  certain  extent 
in  the  far  better  instructed  Dr.  Pusey. 

From  all  such  petty  doubt  Coleridge  was  de- 
livered and  wrought  nobly  to  free  his  countrymen. 
His  imagination  and  sympathies  were  singularly 
catholic.  "  It  has  been  my  habit,  and,  I  may  add, 
the  impulse  of  my  nature,"  he  says  in  the  "  Bio- 
graphia  Literaria,"  "  to  assign  the  grounds  of  my  be- 
lief, rather  than  the  belief  itself  ;  and  not  to  express 
dissent,  till  I  could  establish  some  points  of  com- 
plete sympathy,  some  grounds  common  to  both  sides, 
from  which  to  commence  its  explanation."  *  Lack- 
ing the  gifts  of  method  or  system,  he  was  possessed 

*  Biographia  Literariay  chap.  iii. 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  83 

in  an  extraordinary  degree  by  a  genius  for  insight. 
Hence  what  he  has  left  us  is  a  series  of  splendid 
fragments.  They  are  of  a  seminal  sort,  however : 
they  abide,  take  root,  grow,  and  bear  fruit  after 
their  kind. 

He  felt  keenly  the  vital  connection  between  eth- 
ics or  religion  and  literature  —  which  is  but  another 
way  of  saying  that  he  recognized  the  relation  of  art 
to  life.  In  a  criticism  of  the  poet  Claudian,  found 
among  his  note-books  and  published  many  years 
after  his  death,  he  makes  this  plain.  "  Every  line, 
nay,  every  word,  stops,  looks  full  in  your  face,  and 
asks  and  hegs  for  praise !  .  .  .  I  am  pleased  to 
think  that  when  a  mere  stripling,  I  had  formed  the 
opinion  that  true  taste  was  virtue,  and  that  bad 
writing  was  bad  feeling."  ^ 

This  sound  doctrine  may  serve  to  introduce  a 
somewhat  more  specific  inquiry  as  to  just  the  ele- 
ments of  religious  influence  implicit  if  not  expressed 
in  his  work.  More  than  in  the  case  of  most  great 
writers,  Coleridge's  poetry  distinguishes  itself  from 
his  prose.  No  English  poet  has  given  to  his  verse 
more  of  genuine  witchery,  the  quality  which  at 
once  delights,  haunts,  and  amazes  the  reader,  than 
he  when  at  his  best.  Perhaps  it  might  be  added, 
that  in  no  English  poet  of  eminence  is  there  a  more 
puzzling  gap  between  his  best  and  his  second  best. 
"  The  Pains  of  Sleep"  and  "Dejection"  show  the 
possession  of  poetic  gifts  so   high  and  rare  that 

»  Anima  PoeUE  (1895),  p.  165. 


m  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

many  critics  are  disposed  to  put  them  in  the  first 
class;  and  to  the  first  class  they  might  have  be- 
longed in  the  work  of  almost  any  other  writer ; 
but  the  suffrage  of  posterity  tends  more  and  more 
definitely  to  reserve  that  high  distinction  for  "  The 
Ancient  Mariner/'  "  Kubla  Khan,"  and  "  Christa- 
bel."  It  is  characteristic  that  two  of  these  should 
be  fragments.  "The  Ancient  Mariner"  probably 
comes  as  near  to  exemplifying  in  the  concrete  the 
mysterious  gift  which  we  call  genius,  as  anything 
in  English.  It  glorifies  the  humble  ballad  form; 
the  story  itself  swims  in  a  golden  haze  of  witchery 
comparable  to  that  which  so  often  at  once  illumi- 
nates figures  while  it  obscures  detail  in  Turner's 
painting.  And,  besides  all  this,  it  has  a  distinct 
ethical  quality  so  wondrously  wrought  into  the 
very  texture  of  the  poem  as  never  to  obtrude  itself 
yet  never  to  suffer  itself  to  be  overlooked.  Every 
young  girl's  commonplace  book  or  autograph  al- 
bum contains,  "He  prayeth  best  who  loveth  best"; 
yet  what  reader  of  the  "Ancient  Mariner"  ever 
felt  the  stanza  to  be  other  than  an  integral  part  of 
a  perfect  whole? 

It  is  perhaps  even  more  important  to  note  the 
service  which  Coleridge  renders  to  life  as  well  as 
letters  by  the  reintroduction  of  the  atmosphere  of 
wonder  and  mystery  into  English  verse. ^  As  was 
suggested  in  the  Introduction,  the  capacity  to  won- 
der is  essential  to  complete  mental  and  spiritual 

*  Cf.  J.  C.  Shairp,  Aspects  of  Poetry. 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  86 

development.  It  is  as  needful  to  science  as  it  ever 
can  be  to  religion.  Without  the  sense  of  mystery, 
science  is  in  danger  of  becoming  dry  and  conceited, 
—  a  pseudo-science,  which  — 

simply  remarking  outward  things, 
With  formal  inference  ends,  — 

ethics  degenerates  into  academic  exercise ;  while 
faith  buries  itself  in  the  whited  sepulchre  of  Phari- 
saism. 

In  Coleridge's  prose  this  element  of  the  fanciful 
and  mysterious  does  not  appear.  The  play  of  fancy 
gives  place  to  the  exercise  of  a  very  richly  endowed 
imagination.  It  is  doubtful  if  any  man  ever  wrote 
upon  exalted  philosophical  and  critical  questions 
who  was  so  easy  to  follow  and  comprehend.  There 
is  a  superabundance  of  classical  phrases,  —  a  prov- 
erb seems  without  honour  or  application  except  it 
be  in  Latin,  —  but  the  English  reader  need  never 
be  in  doubt  concerning  the  general  trend  of  the 
argument ;  while  the  wealth  of  cogent  illustration, 
and  the  frequent  occurrence  of  memorable  sen- 
tences, keep  weariness  at  bay.  There  is  a  tradition 
that  Wordsworth  and  Samuel  Kogers  once  sat  three 
hours  with  Coleridge,  who  talked  uninterruptedly 
about  poetry  during  their  entire  stay;  and  that, 
upon  leaving,  each  confessed  to  the  other  that  he 
could  make  neither  head  nor  tail  of  the  discourse. 
It  is  credible ;  but  our  knowledge  of  Coleridge's 
written  prose  —  even  of  so  abstruse  an  essay  as  the 
partial  "Hints  towards  the  Formation  of  a  More 


86  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Comprehensive  Theory  of  Life,"  forbids  us  to  be- 
lieve that  the  morning  could  have  been  barren  of 
either  pleasure  or  profit ;  for  to  a  singular  degree 
in  his  published  communings  upon  the  highest 
themes,  Coleridge  is  at  once  suggestive  and  memo- 
rable. He  himself  said  that  Wordsworth  was  dis- 
tinguished for  the  ''  union  of  deep  feeling  with 
profound  thought;  the  fine  balance  of  truth  in  ob- 
serving with  the  imaginative  faculty  in  modifying 
the  objects  observed;  and  above  all  the  original 
gift  of  spreading  the  tone,  the  atmosphere,  and 
with  it  the  depth  and  height  of  the  ideal  world 
around  forms,  incidents,  and  situations  of  which, 
for  the  common  view,  custom  had  bedimmed  all 
the  lustre,  had  dried  up  the  sparkle  and  the  dew- 
drops."  * 

The  words  can  fairly  be  applied  to  his  own 
"Aids  to  Reflection  "  and  "  Confessions  of  an  In- 
quiring Spirit."  The  latter  may  serve  as  an  ex- 
ample of  a  service  rendered  by  Coleridge  to  his 
own  generation,  and  in  no  sense  outgrown  by  ours. 
The  Christian  thought  of  his  day  was  in  bondage 
to  a  dogma  of  Inspiration  whose  lustre  had  indeed 
grown  dim.  It  plagued  the  thoughtful  and  con- 
scientious, hampered  Biblical  research,  and  pro- 
voked the  scorn  of  the  graceless.  The  inerrancy  of 
Scripture  had  become  a  superstition.  No  question 
of  ordinary  literary  interest  could  be  raised  con- 
cerning the  style  or  content  of  the  Bible,  without 
'  Biographia  Literaria,  chap.  iv. 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  87 

danger  of  incurring  the  charge  of  blasphemy.  To 
these  conditions  Coleridge  applied  two  principles 
of  criticism.  One  was,  that  in  all  superstition  there 
is  a  heart  of  unbelief ;  the  other,  that  the  figure  of 
dictation  to  an  amanuensis  was,  and  must  ever  be, 
hopelessly  inadequate  to  represent  the  inspiration 
of  a  good  man  or  a  sacred  literature.  "  Why  should 
I  not  believe  the  Scriptures  throughout  dictated, 
in  word  and  thought,  by  an  infallible  Intelligence  ? 
.  .  .  For  every  reason  that  makes  me  prize  and 
revere  these  Scriptures.  .  .  .  Because  the  Doctrine 
in  question  petrifies  at  once  the  whole  body  of 
Holy  Writ  with  all  its  harmonious  and  symmetrical 
gradations.  .  .  .  This  breathing  organism  .  .  .  the 
Doctrine  in  question  turns  at  once  into  a  colossal 
Memnon's  head,  a  hollow  passage  for  a  voice." 

That  phrase,  "  this  breathing  organism,"  is  highly 
significant  for  the  understanding  of  Coleridge's 
philosophy  and  criticism.  He  had  a  keen  sense  and 
a  high  respect  for  the  organic.  The  attempt  to 
account  for  life  or  literature  upon  a  mechanical 
basis  was  in  his  eyes  not  only  to  fail  in  criticism, 
but  to  commit  sacrilege.  His  lectures  upon  Shake- 
speare and  Milton  are  vitalized  by  this  sense  of 
organic  form.  There  is  a  something  in  the  whole 
which  cannot  be  obtained  by  the  mere  addition  of 
the  parts.  So  he  discovered  the  Bible  to  be  a  spirit- 
ual world  in  which  each  man  found  his  own  indi- 
vidual experience  prefigured.  Psalm  XXHT  means 
one  thing  if  we  conceive  it  to  be  the  product  of  a 


88  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

divine  mandate  issued  to  a  human  automaton  with 
no  choice  but  to  record  it.  It  bears  a  different 
and  very  much  richer  message  to  him  who  sees  it 
wrought  out  of  the  stress  and  struggle  of  a  fallible 
but  believing  human  soul,  —  a  man  who,  threatened 
by  peril  in  the  wilderness,  has  found,  under  divine 
guidance,  green  pastures  and  waters  of  comfort; 
whose  enemies  have  not  been  able  to  rob  him  of 
the  sources  of  sustenance  which  God  has  made 
sure  and  imperishable;  and  who  has  learned  to 
contemplate  with  calmness  even  the  dark  adventure 
of  death,  assured  that  for  this  also  God  will  enable 
him.  Coleridge  recognized  with  characteristic  can- 
dour that  this  more  reasonable  doctrine  of  inspira- 
tion as  a  presence  of  the  Spirit  in  human  life, 
sanctifying  all  experience,  and  making  it  the  natu- 
ral means  of  revelation,  might  work  temporary  em- 
barrassment and  loss  of  authority  to  theologians 
of  the  dogmatic  school.  But  none  the  less  his  hope 
stood  sure  in  the  validity  of  his  doctrine  and  its 
application  to  the  need  of  man.  Some  might  wrest 
it  to  their  own  hurt,  picking  and  choosing  wilfully 
such  Scripture  as  comported  with  their  taste  rather 
than  that  which  met  their  need ;  but  this  is  ever 
man's  privilege  in  every  department  of  Hfe.  Others 
might  raise  embarrassing  questions  —  at  least  they 
seemed  embarrassing  in  the  second  and  third  de- 
cades of  last  century — concerning  the  degree  and 
quality  of  inspiration  to  be  assigned  to  great  and 
worthy  extra-Biblical   writings.   Still   he   had   his 


SONS  OF  THE  MORNING  89 

answer  ready.  Among  these  other  worthies  the 
Bible  would  maintain  its  place  like  the  sheaf  which 
stood  upright  and  received  the  obeisance  of  the 
other  sheaves.  What  need  to  make  hard  and  fast, 
or  petty  and  peddling,  distinctions  ?  Were  they 
not  sheaves  of  the  same  harvest;  the  sheaves  of 
brethren ;  and  was  not  the  bread  of  life  in  all  ?  ^ 

This  is  not  to  maintain  that  Coleridge's  position 
was  precisely  that  of  the  best  instruc^Jied  scholars  of 
to-day ;  but  it  had  this  distinction,  which  put  his 
own  and  later  decades  in  debt  to  him,  that,  while 
it  maintained  a  doctrine  of  inspiration  which  ac- 
corded with  the  nature  of  man  as  made  in  God's 
image,  and  with  man's  experience  of  God  as  a 
Spirit,  —  the  Lord  and  Giver  of  Life,  to  Whom  all 
avenues  of  nature  are  open,  —  it  yet  interpreted 
this  new  view  constructively  and  vitally,  so  that  he 
who  accepted  it  felt  himself  to  be  twice  the  believer 
that  he  was  before. 

It  was  Coleridge's  conviction  that  "in  energetic 
minds  truth  soon  changes  by  domestication  into 
power."  ^  He  had  entire  confidence  that  the  new 
views  of  great  things  to  which  his  eyes  were  open 
would  accord  with  all  that  was  highest  and  best  in 
man's  past  experience ;  and  that  whatever  tempo- 
rary confusion  they  might  import  into  received 
opinions,  their  ultimate  result  must  be  the  supply 
of  a  more  abundant  charter  for  faith  than  ever.  He 

*  Confessions  of  an  Inquiring  Spirit,  letter  vi. 
'  Biographia  Literaria,  chap.  iv. 


90  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

has  placed  the  world  in  his  debt  by  the  consistency 
with  which,  throughout  a  somewhat  inconsequent 
and  fragmentary  career,  he  clung  to  two  or  three 
principles  of  life  and  criticism.  He  believed  that 
God  was  in  His  world  in  so  intimate  and  real  a  sense 
that  fearless  investigation  in  any  direction  must 
ultimately  serve  to  strengthen  religious  faith.  He 
believed  in  the  validity  of  man's  religious  experience, 
and  that  the  highest  literature  was  that  which  went 
deepest  into  the  realm  of  the  spiritual ;  but  that,  in 
criticism  as  in  life,  it  is  needful  to  remember  that  man 
is  an  organism  not  to  be  accounted  for  upon  merely 
mechanical  principles,  not  to  be  understood  except 
by  the  "  genial  mind."  To  him  the  doubts  and  fears 
of  men  were  scarcely  less  significant  than  their 
hopes  and  aspirations.  Thus  these  two  poets,  Words- 
worth with  his  sense  of  the  significance  of  the 
goodly  frame  of  earth  and  the  plain  people  in  it, 
and  Coleridge  with  his  eldritch  fancy,  his  insatiable 
curiosity  concerning  the  nature  and  origin  of  ex- 
perience, and  his  consummate  mastery  of  the  art 
of  expression,  since  both  were  men  of  faith,  belong 
among  — 

the  happy  few 

Who  dwell  on  earth,  yet  breathe  empyreal  air, 

Sons  of  the  morning. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  APOSTLES  OP  BEVOLT  :  BYRON  AKD   SHELLEY 

When  the  natural  history  of  revolutions  comes  to 
be  written  it  will  probably  appear  that  Mirabeau, 
Danton,  and  Napoleon  represent  something  more 
than  individuals  who  played  a  great  part  in  the 
most  notable  of  political  and  social  upheavals. 
They  stand  for  types.  Mirabeau  represents  the 
better  element  of  the  Past,  suddenly  come  to  it- 
self, conscious  of  its  danger,  in  some  degree  per- 
haps conscious  of  its  shortcomings  and  guilt,  and 
resolute  to  atone  for  them  by  a  recognition  of  the 
new  order  of  things;  but  anxious  to  guide  the 
forces  of  change  along  immediately  constructive 
channels  —  to  save  the  fabric  of  the  state  from 
wreck.  There  is  a  story,  very  possibly  apocryphal, 
that  Mirabeau  once  mounted  the  Assembly's  trib- 
une, and,  impelled  by  a  sense  of  his  own  inade- 
quacy to  the  demands  of  the  moment,  owing  to  the 
general  lack  of  confidence  in  his  character,  cried 
out,  "Oh  that  I  had  a  different  past!"  He  was 
thinking  of  his  own  misspent  youth ;  but  he  spoke 
for  France  and  that  element  in  her  life  which  he 
represented. 

Danton,  on  the  other  hand,  stands  for  the  revolu- 


92  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tionary  impulse,  pure  and  simple,  upon  its  destruc- 
tive side.  His  are  the  fire,  the  sword,  the  plough- 
share, all  those  implements  whose  office  is  to  con- 
sume, to  destroy,  to  overturn,  to  leave  nothing 
as  it  has  been.  The  antithesis  of  Lord  Strafford 
in  manner  and  purpose,  ^thorough'  is  no  less  his 
motto. 

To  the  work  of  these  there  succeeds  the  career 
of  the  soldier  and  builder,  himself  in  some  respects 
a  mightier  clearer-away  of  rubbish  than  either  of 
his  predecessors,  but  primarily  a  man  of  ambitions 
and  plans  whose  fulfilment  is  made  possible  no  less 
by  the  new  day  of  which  they  have  been  heralds, 
than  by  his  own  genius.  He  is  sure  to  be  a  great 
and  striking  figure  in  history,  and  to  leave  an  in- 
effaceable stamp  upon  institutions.  His  influence 
is  so  portentous  moreover,  good  and  ill  are  so 
strangely  and  inextricably  mingled  in  it,  that  his 
character  remains  long,  perhaps  permanently,  in 
debate.  He  is  not  to  be  accounted  for  by  ordinary 
rules;  but  he  exercises  a  compelling  fascination 
upon  the  minds  of  men,  and  goes  far  toward 
forming  the  ideals  of  multitudes. 

It  is  scarcely  too  much  to  say  that  Lord  Byron 
united  in  himself  something  that  was  most  char- 
acteristic of  these  three  graces  or  furies  of  Revolu- 
tion. With  the  aristocratic  connections  and  predi- 
lections of  a  Mirabeau,  he  possessed  that  lion-like 
man's  native  force  of  mind  and  body,  and,  still 
like  him,  wasted  much  of  it  in  debauchery,  though 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  93 

retaining  always,  as  his  letters  show,  a  generous 
modicum  of  strong  common  sense.  At  war  with 
society  and  its  recognized  conventions,  he,  as  one 
of  his  latest  biographers  has  observed,  adopted 
Danton's  motto,  "  L'audace,  Taudace,  toujours 
Taudace,"*  and  was  pretty  consistent  in  his  appli- 
cation of  it  to  life ;  while  his  admiration  of  Napo- 
leon was  almost  an  obsession,  as  the  great  coach 
built  upon  the  lines  of  Napoleon's  travelhng  car- 
riage, and  with  similar  arrangements  for  eating  and 
sleeping  en  route,  long  bore  witness. 

But  it  is  when  we  come  to  account  for  his 
place  and  influence  that  the  Napoleonic  parallel 
most  clearly  asserts  itself.  It  was  Napoleon  whom 
Goethe  undoubtedly  had  in  mind  when,  in  his 
Autobiography,  he  confessed  his  faith  in  "dae- 
monic influence."  He  had  noticed  the  phenomenon 
in  looking  about  for  a  satisfying  religious  system. 
"It  was  not  divine,  for  it  seemed  unintellectual ; 
nor  human,  for  it  was  no  result  of  understanding; 
nor  diabolic,  for  it  was  of  beneficent  tendency;  nor 
angeHc,  for  you  could  often  notice  in  it  a  certain 
mischievousness.  .  .  .  Everything  which  fetters 
human  agency  seemed  to  yield  before  it ;  it  seemed 
to  dispose  arbitrarily  of  the  necessary  elements  of 
our  existence."  It  is  but  rarely  that  those  who  ex- 
ert this  influence  recommend  themselves  by  good- 
ness of  heart;  "but  a  gigantic  force  goes  out  of 
them,  and  they  exercise  an  incredible  power  over 

*  John  Nichol,  Byron,  chap.  xi. 


94  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

all  creatures,  nay,  even  over  the  elements  them- 
selves; and  who  can  say  how  far  this  influence 
may  reach?  All  moral  forces  are  powerless  against 
them.  The  masses  are  fascinated  by  them.  They 
are  only  to  be  conquered  by  the  universe  it- 
self."^ 

Lord  Byron  presents  a  cognate  phenomenon  in 
the  world  of  literature.  He  was  a  sort  of  portent,  a 
comet  that  for  a  while  fixed  men's  gaze  to  the  ex- 
clusion of  the  faithful  and  beneficent  stars,  but 
whose  orbit  and  real  significance  are  not  easily  cal- 
culated. He  did  his  work  at  a  time  when  the  prin- 
ciples of  literary  revolution  had  been  pretty  well 
established  by  Cowper,  Crabbe,  and  Burns.  The 
best  work  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  had  been 
done  and  was  struggling  for  the  recognition  which 
it  deserved  and  was  finally  to  obtain.  A  new  hun- 
ger for  romance  was  awakening  in  Britain.  Chat- 
terton  had  been  its  herald.  The  crude  inventions 
of  Mrs.  Kadcliffe  and  Horace  Walpole  had  fed  it,  — 
but  upon  husks.  Scott  and  South ey  provided  meat 
far  more  convenient  for  it;  until  in  Byron's  day  it 
had  reached,  not  a  critical  maturity,  but  an  adoles- 
cence capable  of  great  enthusiasms  and  insane  ex- 
travagances. Byron's  extraordinary  career  is  not  to 
be  understood,  probably  it  was  not  possible,  apart 
from  this  public,  excited  by  the  political  and  social 
overturnings  of  the  last  two  decades,  stirred  to  its 

^  Cf.  the  reference  to  this  passage  by  the  late  R.  H.  Hutton : 
"  Goethe  and  his  Influence,"  Literary  Essays,  pp.  1-2. 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  95 

depths  by  the  portent  of  Napoleon,  alternately 
amused  and  angered  by  the  new  literary  impulse 
which  was  voicing  itself  in  the  "  Edinburgh/'  the 
"Quarterly,"  and  "Blackwood's,"  and  ready,  as 
perhaps  a  British  public  never  was  ready,  before  or 
since,  for  a  new  and  mad  enthusiasm.  Upon  such 
a  morning  as  this  Byron  could  wake  and  find  him- 
self famous ;  and  in  a  day  fittingly  introduced  by 
such  a  morning,  he  was  able  to  eclipse  men  so  su- 
perior in  every  attribute  of  manhood  as  Sir  Walter 
Scott,  and  poets  like  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth. 

It  is  with  a  sort  of  half-nauseated  amusement 
that  the  reader  of  to-day  toils  through  the  mass  of 
Byronic  literature.  He  dutifully  notes  the  slightly 
deformed  foot,  the  teeth  of  exquisite  brilliance  and 
regularity,  the  hands  gloved  indoors  as  well  as  out 
to  keep  them  white,  and  the  temples,  shaved,  as 
Byron  said,  to  preserve  the  vigour  of  the  hair  — 
although  incidentally  of  course  the  process  height- 
ened a  '  marble  brow ' ;  and  wonders  whether  out- 
side a  library  of  three-volume  novels  so  much  space 
were  ever  before  given  to  sentimental  nonsense. 
Sir  Walter  Scott  was  lame,  and  bore  his  infirmity 
like  a  Christian  and  a  gentleman.  Coleridge  —  it 
surprises  us  a  little  —  kept  his  hands  with  scrupu- 
lous neatness.  Wordsworth  dressed  like  a  peasant, 
and  sometimes  drove  abroad  in  a  dung-cart,  with  a 
plain  deal  board  laid  across  the  sides  for  a  seat. 
Cowper  wore  a  night-cap  which  has,  alas,  been  per- 
petuated by  Romney.  Crabbe,  in  his  old  age,  grew 


96  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

beautifully  grey,  so  that  a  little  child  in  his  parish 
said  quite  simply  when  told  of  his  death,  "We 
shall  never  see  his  good  white  head  going  up  into 
the  pulpit  any  more."  These  matters  are  incidents 
in  notable  careers  which  possess  a  certain  interest 
if  we  stumble  upon  them  casually,  but  are  in  no 
way  essential  to  our  understanding  of  the  career 
itself.  In  Byron's  case  they  are  of  the  essence  of 
his  make-up. 

I  am  resolute  to  exclude  the  judgement  of  Mr. 
Saintsbury  here  because  of  his  well-known  anti- 
Byronic  views ;  but  none  the  less,  in  reminding  us 
that  the  light  of  Byron's  muse,  so  far  from  being 
that  which  never  was  on  land  or  sea,  is  the  light 
which  shines  nightly  on  the  front  of  the  stage,  he 
speaks  words  of  truth  and  soberness.  Byron  was 
the  great  \iteT3iTj  poseur  of  the  century.  No  esti- 
mate of  his  character  or  his  work  can  be  adequate 
which  leaves  his  consuming  vanity  out  of  account ; 
nor  does  the  memory  recall  any  mind  of  a  high 
order  of  ability  the  ideals  of  whose  vanity  were  so 
perverse.  Egotism  could  scarce  go  further  in  the 
direction  of  that  perversity  which  is  close  allied  to 
madness,  than  in  the  attempt,  made  again  and 
again  in  his  writings  and  conversation,  to  represent 
himself  as  the  hero  of  all  sorts  of  dubious  adven- 
tures ;  unless  it  were  in  an  endeavour  to  appear  the 
victim  of  melancholy  induced  by  remorse.  This 
"  pageant  of  his  bleeding  heart "  was  wonderfully 
effective.  It  brought  multitudes  of  readers  and  ad- 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  97 

mirers;  but  it  came  perilously  near  to  justifying 
Mr.  Mallock's  recipe  for  writing  "  a  Satanic  poem 
like  the  late  Lord  Byron." 

"  Take  a  couple  of  fine  deadly  sins  and  let  them 
hang  before  your  eyes  until  they  become  racy.  Then 
take  them  down,  dissect  them,  and  stew  them  for 
some  time  in  a  solution  of  weak  remorse ;  after  which 
they  may  be  devilled  with  mock  despair." 

It  is  impertinent,  of  course,  but  then,  so  was  Lord 
Byron,  and  most  free  from  taint  or  suspicion  of 
hypocrisy  when  he  was  impertinent,  as  in  his  early 
"English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers," — though 
even  here  one  is  forced  to  add  a  postscript  to  the 
effect  that  this  satire  was  almost  certainly  composed 
with  a  view  merely  to  the  English  Bards,  and  only 
launched  at  the  Scotch  Reviewers  after  the  famous 
criticism  in  the  "Edinburgh"  had  opened  the  way 
for  a  little  more  extended  and  telling  insolence  than 
the  poet  had  originally  contemplated. 

It  will  readily  be  imagined  that  any  one  who  looks 
for  a  unifying  principle,  philosophic,  religious,  or 
political,  in  the  mass  of  Byron's  verse  wiU  look  in 
vain.  The  centre  of  all  is  Himself.  With  Protean 
facility  he  appears  and  reappears  as  Childe  Harold, 
as  Manfred,  as  Don  Juan.  This  is  not  for  a  moment 
to  question  his  possession  of  extraordinary  poetic 
gifts ;  it  is  not  to  impugn  the  courage  which  he 
undoubtedly  possessed,  or  the  generosity  of  which 
he  was  occasionally  capable,  or  the  sincerity  of  his 
attachment  to  the  cause  of  liberty,  or  the  enormous 


98  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

obstacles  which  heredity,  early  training,  and  later 
environment  opposed  to  the  development  of  any 
consistent  and  satisfying  manhood.  The  broken 
sentence,  which  he  interrupted  when  he  found  him- 
self likely  to  be  betrayed  into  sincere  and  earnest 
expression,  was  characteristic  of  his  conversation ; 
and  it  was  necessary  that  his  general  attitude  toward 
men  and  things  fitted  to  dwarf  the  central  figure 
of  himself  should  have  been  one  of  denial  or  scorn. 
Hence  his  cynicism  not  only  becomes  him,  but  is 
essential  to  him.  There  is  no  need  to  formulate  its 
gospel  into  the  code  of  perversity  which  Macaulay 
attributed  to  him, "  Thou  shalt  hate  thy  neighbour, 
and  thou  shalt  love  thy  neighbour's  wife."  Byron 
was  not  the  man  to  own  allegiance  to  anything,  not 
even  to  a  person  of  his  own  choosing  or  a  creed  of 
his  own  making.  He  was  no  unbeliever,  as  Shelley 
thought  himself  to  be.  Indeed,  if  the  testimony  of 
his  valet  Fletcher  is  to  be  received  at  anything  like 
face  value,  he  maintained  a  pretty  consistent  claim 
to  faith  in  the  fundamentals  of  Christianity.  Had 
he  been  a  frank  and  devoted  apostle  of  revolution, 
as  Shelley  was,  he  might  conceivably  have  placed 
us  under  a  genuine  debt :  the  note  of  scorn  may 
help  when  it  ministers  to  something  higher ;  though 
unruly  and  treacherous,  it  sometimes  proves  a  useful 
servant;  but  as  a  master  its  tyranny  is  hopeless  and 
fruitless,  and  Byron  was  more  completely  its  slave 
than  Swift  had  ever  been.  There  is  a  trace  of  tonic 
quality  in  the  sceva  indignatio  of  the  latter.  The 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  99 

mockery  of  the  former  would,  if  no  corrective  were 
supplied,  poison  the  very  fountains  of  moral  and 
spiritual  health. 

On  the  other  hand  we  may  admit  Byron's  genuine 
love  for  this  goodly  frame  of  earth.  His  pessimism 
does  not  extend,  like  Thomson's,*  to  sea  or  sky.  It 
is  the  latter  who  sings,  — 

For  I  am  infinitely  tired 
With  this  old  sphere  we  once  admired, 
With  this  old  earth  we  loved  too  well, 
And  would  not  mind  a  change  of  Hell. 

Byron  felt  the  freedom  of  the  open  sea  and  re- 
sponded to  the  strange  influence  —  half  uplift,  half 
oppression  —  of  the  mountains.  Most  of  all,  per- 
haps, he  took  joy  of  the  meeting  of  sea  and  land 
upon  the  picturesque  Italian  coast,  where  it  was 
his  custom  after  bathing  to  climb  to  some  point  of 
observation  and  sit  for  hours  in  thought.  There 
is  no  affectation  in  his  feeling  for  nature,  although 
there  is  sometimes  a  trace  of  bombast  in  his  versi- 
fication of  it,  even  the  famous  — 

Roll  on,  thou  deep  and  dark  blue  Ocean,  roll ! 

containing  just  a  suggestion  of  Ossian.  But  when 
men  begin  to  move  and  dream  and  suffer  on  the  sea 
or  in  the  hills,  then  at  once  the  motive  of  sincerity 
grows  mixed.  Manfred  in  the  Alps  is  hopelessly 
melodramatic  :  — 

»  The  reference  is,  of  coarse,  to  "  B.  V."  of  The  City  of  Dread' 
f\ji  Night  ;  not  to  him  of  The  Seasons. 


100  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"  The  mists  boil  up  around  the  glaciers  ;  clouds 
Rise  curling  fast  beneath  me,  white  and  sulphury,  ' 

Like  foam  from  the  roused  ocean  of  deep  Hell, 
Whose  every  wave  beats  on  a  living  shore, 
Heap'd  with  the  damn'd  like  pebbles.  —  I  am  giddy,'* 

The  reader  does  not  wonder  that  the  chamois- 
hunter  who  appears  in  time  to  prevent  Manfred's 
own  plunge  into  this  ocean  cries,  — 

"  This  is  convulsion  and  no  healthful  life." 

It  is  the  ultimate  criticism  to  be  passed,  not  only 
upon  this  particular  play,  but  upon  the  Byronic 
idea  of  tragedy.  The  element  of  misanthropy  was 
inevitable  to  Byron,  in  view  of  his  character  and 
the  manner  of  his  passionate  and  chaotic  life ;  but 
he  only  serves  to  illustrate  again  what  every  true 
student  of  life  and  literature  must  have  observed, 
that  tragedy  of  a  genuine  sort  is  beyond  the  reach 
of  a  misanthrope.  The  deeper  and  graver  contra- 
dictions of  circumstance  require  correspondently 
deep  and  grave  sympathies  for  their  interpretation. 
Here  Byron  fails,  falling  upon  mere  sound  and  fury 
to  perform  an  office  in  which  the  heart  must  be 
honestly  enlisted  if  it  is  ever  to  be  adequately  done. 
So,  on  the  other  hand,  when  the  poet  launches  out 
into  the  deep,  I,  for  one,  prefer  the  rather  common- 
place descriptive  poem  of  "  The  Island,"  built  as  it 
is  upon  the  framework  of  the  famous  Bounty  mu- 
tiny, to  the  much  lauded  shipwreck  in  "  Don  Juan." 
There  is  no  doubt  whatever  that  the  second  canto 
of  "Don  Juan"  shows  that  Byron  possessed  an 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  101 

extraordinary  facility  in  the  translation  of  prose 
into  verse  —  some  of  it  extremely  bad  verse.  The 
whole  shipwreck  scene  bears  testimony  which  can- 
not be  gainsaid  to  his  acquaintance  with  the  sea, 
to  his  knowledge  of  its  dangers  and  its  ways,  to  his 
laborious  study  of  narratives  of  storm  and  wreck, 
to  an  almost  unrivalled  rhetorical  gift,  and  to  as 
complete  an  absence  of  good  taste  and  a  true  sense 
of  tragedy. 

Sir  Walter  Scott,  in  one  of  those  Philistine  out- 
bursts which  testify  so  conclusively  to  his  frank 
and  genuine  humanity,  remarked  that  Lord  Byron 
handled  his  pen  with  the  careless  ease  of  a  man  of 
quality;  and  no  doubt  Byron  liked  to  spread  the 
impression  abroad  that  he  never  drudged  at  verse- 
making.  It  was  his  boast  that "  Lara"  was  composed 
while  undressing  on  his  return  from  masques  and 
balls,  while  the  "  Bride"  and  the  "Corsair"  were 
written  in  four  and  ten  days  respectively.  Be  this 
as  it  may,  a  careful  study  of  the  shipwreck  scene 
in  "  Don  Juan  "  shows  it  to  be  a  paraphrase  of 
fragments  taken  bodily  from  stories  of  famous  dis- 
asters and  pieced  together  with  amazing  inventive- 
ness and  skill.  It  should  be  remembered  that  these 
were  authentic  accounts  of  heroic  struggle  in  which 
men  matched  their  puny  strength  against  the  mighti- 
est forces  of  nature;  of  long-continued  suffering 
often  borne  with  sublime  patience ;  and  of  genuinely 
tragic  death.  Yet  Byron  has  deliberately  set  him- 
self to  the  transformation  of  this  material  into  a 


102  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

conglomerate,  not  merely  of  tragedy  and  comedy, 
—  which  might  conceivably  be  true  to  life,  —  but 
of  sentimentality  varied  with  burlesque.  It  is  very 
likely  done  as  well  as  it  could  be  done  saving  the 
crudity  of  some  stanzas ;  but  it  was  none  the  less  a 
barbarous  thing  to  do  at  all,  a  thing  impossible  to 
a  man  of  fine  and  high  feeling.  Literature  will,  I 
hope,  always  have  a  place  for  "  Bab  Ballads  "  and 
the  like.  It  is  no  grudging  immortality  which  one 
concedes  to  — 

"  Oh,  I  am  a  cook,  and  a  captain  bold, 
And  the  mate  o'  the  Nancy,  brig." 

The  process  whereby  the  singer  attained  to  his 
strange  eminence,  involving  as  it  did  the  cooking 
and  eating  of  his  companions,  is  told  with  a  par- 
ticularity at  once  so  grewsome  and  delicious  as  to 
give  it  high  place  in  farce.  But  suppose  Mr.  Gil- 
bert had  gone  through  the  Admiralty  archives  and 
searched  the  records  of  Lloyd's  in  order  to  burlesque 
some  of  the  moving  incidents  of  shipwreck,  while 
to  others  he  accorded  the  meed  of  rather  sentimen- 
tal homage ;  suppose,  to  be  specific,  that  he  had 
retold  the  loss  of  the  Birkenhead  in  the  manner  of 
Sir  Francis  Doyle,  but  had  introduced  some  jocose 
quip,  or  played  some  clever  metric  prank,  at  the 
end  of  each  alternate  stanza.  To  suppose  such  a 
thing  involves  the  necessity  of  apologizing  to  Mr. 
Gilbert's  memory;  yet  it  is  a  fair  parallel  to  Lord 
Byron's  performance  in  this  famous  canto. 

Mr.  Swinburne,  in  his  memorable  and  character^ 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  103 

istically  extravagant  essay  upon  Wordsworth  and 
Byron,  has  specified  imagination  and  harmony  as 
two  indispensable  elements  in  genuine  poetry.  Both 
of  these  are  notably  lacking  in  most  of  Byron's 
work.  Inventiveness  and  ingenuity  he  has  in  high 
degree;  he  is  passed-master  in  that  art  of  quick 
transition,  which  gives  the  form  and  often  the  soul 
of  smartness  —  if  smartness  have  a  soul  —  to  verse. 
But  that  imagination  which  sees  into  the  heart  of 
men  and  things,  which  puts  one's  self  in  another's 
place,  and  perceives  particulars  in  their  universal 
aspect,  he  assuredly  lacked;  and  with  it  the  sense 
of  harmony,  whether  as  applied  to  the  mere  music 
of  verse,  or  given  that  wider  application  which  en- 
ables the  music  of  verse  to  echo  the  deeper  harmo- 
nies of  life.  He  could  be  melodious  enough  at  times, 
and  some  of  his  lyrics  will  be  long  remembered.^ 

I  have  expressed  this  general  opinion  of  Byron 
with  a  little  hesitation  because  of  a  fear  lest  my 
theme  should  seem  to  have  inoculated  me  with  anti- 
Byronic  prejudice.  So  far  from  being  conscious  of 
such  prejudice,  I  felt,  as  not  long  ago  I  undertook 
to  renew  and  extend  acquaintance  with  him  after 

*  So,  the  reader  will  remind  me,  will  the  tributes  of  Continental 
critics,  especially  Goethe,  Mazzini,  and  Castelar.  It  is  unquestionably 
a  notable  thing  that  these  representatives  of  three  great  Continental 
literatures  should  have  been  so  ready  to  pay  tribute  to  Byron.  They 
are  eminent  names  and  their  dicta  are  not  to  be  set  aside  lightly  ; 
but  what  is  needful  to  be  said  in  answer  has  been  said  with  so  great 
aptness,  fairness,  and  conclusiveness  by  Mr.  Swinburne  {Nineteenth 
Century,  vol.  xv)  as  to  relieve  all  later  critics  of  responsibility  and 
opportunity  alike. 


104  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

many  years  of  relative  neglect,  a  distinct  expecta- 
tion of  interest  and  uplift.  There  was  no  especial 
anticipation  of  agreement ;  but  I  was  entirely  ready 
to  appreciate,  —  to  admire  strength  and  vital  force 
in  themselves  even  where  I  could  not  approve  the 
manner  or  the  object  of  their  expenditure.  The 
first  long  poem  to  be  read  continuously  was  "  Cain/' 
and  from  it  I  passed  on,  by  way  of  the  "  Hebrew 
Melodies  "  and  other  miscellanies,  to  "  Childe  Har- 
old," "  Don  Juan,"  "  The  Island,"  and  "  Manfred." 
But  alas  for  my  expected  impulse  either  pro  or  con  ! 
For  about  this  same  time  I  was  reading  Shelley's 
"Prometheus  Unbound,"  and  discovered  that  be- 
side him  Byron's  Lucifer  grew  stale  and  unprofit- 
able indeed.  Since  that  experience,  I  have  chanced 
upon  a  remark  by  Mr.  Saintsbury  which  is  exactly 
descriptive  of  it.  "  The  really  great  poets  do  not 
injure  each  other  in  the  very  least  by  comparison, 
different  as  they  are.  Milton  does  not  '  kill '  Words- 
worth ;  Spenser  does  not  injure  Shelley ;  there  is  no 
danger  in  reading  Keats  immediately  after  Cole- 
ridge. But  read  Byron  in  close  juxtaposition  with 
any  of  these,  or  with  not  a  few  others,  and  the  ef- 
fect, to  any  good  poetic  taste,  must  surely  be  dis- 
astrous." 

Where  lies  the  secret  of  this?  In  the  fact,  I 
think,  that  there  is  no  room  in  the  circle  of  the 
greatest  poets  for  the  mocker,  no  place  in  the 
greatest  poetry  for  the  sneer.  Yet  the  sneer  and 
mocking  question  may  be  said  to  comprise  Byron's 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  105 

whole  arsenal  of  negative  weapons  in  "Cain." 
There  are  some  powerful  lines  —  though  none  too 
many  of  them;  there  are  one  or  two  powerfully 
painted  scenes ;  there  is  a  certain  beauty  and  pathos 
in  the  pleading  of  Cain's  wife ;  but  intellectually 
Cain  is  almost  as  feeble  as  the  late  Robert  Elsmere ; 
while  Lucifer  himself  exhibits  few  characteristics 
which  either  promise  or  threaten  to  give  him  per- 
manent hold  upon  the  minds  of  men.  A  most  sym- 
pathetic critic  has  remarked  that  "  bare  rebellion 
cannot  endure,  and  no  succession  of  generations  can 
continue  nourishing  themselves  on  the  poetry  of 
complaint,  and  the  idealization  of  revolt."  ^ 

It  would  be  difficult  to  characterize  better  By- 
ron's service  to  his  age  and  his  failure  to  attain  the 
place  for  which  the  possession  of  his  unquestionably 
great  powers  seemed  to  destine  him.  I  have  called 
him  an  apostle  of  revolution.  "  Complaint,  and  the 
idealization  of  revolt "  gave  to  his  whole  life  and 
work  an  almost  tragically  disjointed  and  negative 
aspect.  He  loved  freedom — yet  it  was  a  freedom 
not  merely  from  tyranny,  but  from  all  restraint, 
whether  exercised  by  society  or  himself.  Let  us  be 
generous  here.  It  is  hard  to  realize  to-day  how 
much,  in  the  reaction  following  upon  the  Napole- 
onic wars,  there  was  to  revolt  against,  in  social  and 
domestic  life,  in  politics  and  religion.  The  age  de- 
served its  Byron,  and  conceivably  his  ill-ordered 
life  and  incoherent  message  may  have  been  better 

*  John  Morley,  Critical  Miscellanies,  First  Series,  p.  254. 


106  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

fitted  to  the  needful  work  than  a  finer  and  more 
artistic  instrument.  So,  too,  in  reply  to  Matthew 
Arnold's  friendly  criticism  of  a  lack  of  matter,  and 
Mr.  Morley's  eminently  fair  though  searching  re- 
mark that  Byron  was  weak  upon  the  reflective  side 
and  lacked  intellectual  means  of  satisfying  himself 
in  respect  of  his  visions  and  aspirations/  Carlyle's 
outburst  upon  the  poet's  death  may  always  be  cited, 
"  Byron  —  good  generous  hapless  Byron  !  And  yet 
when  he  died  he  was  only  a  Kraftmann  [powerman, 
as  the  Germans  call  them).  Had  he  lived  he  would 
have  been  a  poet."  He  seems  indeed  like  a  youth 
of  extraordinary  gifts  and  equally  extraordinary 
vanity  whose  development  has  halted  in  his  sopho- 
more year — the  age  of  sporadic  generosity  and 
epidemic  perversity. 

No  man  can  illustrate  better  the  need  which  Lit- 
erature has  of  some  comprehensive  and  coordinating 
principle  upon  which  to  feed  her  soul.  In  letters 
as  in  life  the  word  of  the  Apostle  stands,  "  By  faith 
are  ye  saved."  Without  it  tragedy  sickens  into 
melodrama,  and  comedy  degenerates  into  wearisome 
burlesque.  There  is  no  room  to  doubt  the  tragic 
element  in  life  ;  its  rudiments  appear  in  every  con- 
tradiction offered  to  human  hope  and  aspiration. 
As  little  can  one  question  the  element  of  comedy, 
implicit  as  it  is  in  the  multitude  of  life's  queer  in- 
congruities. The  great  poet  sees  both  elements  and 
fuses  them  in  the  alembic  of  his  mind.  This  natural 

^  Critical  MisceUanies,  First  Series,  p.  275. 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  107 

mingling  of  tears  and  laughter  is  possible  to  him 
according  as  he  has  faith  in  man  as  God's  son 
reflecting  the  universe  in  petto  ;  equal,  because  of 
his  divine  origin  and  destiny,  to  the  ultimate  mas- 
tery of  fate,  and  therefore  able  to  beguile  the  way 
with  honest  mirth  at  the  play  of  circumstance. 

In  passing  from  Byron  to  Shelley,  I  am  reminded 
of  a  criticism  by  Coleridge  upon  the  characters  of 
Caliban  and  Ariel. 

"  The  character  of  Caliban  is  wonderfully  con- 
ceived :  he  is  a  sort  of  creature  of  the  earth,  as 
Ariel  is  a  sort  of  creature  of  the  air.  .  .  .  Still, 
Caliban  is  in  some  respects  a  noble  being :  the  poet 
has  raised  him  far  above  contempt,  —  he  is  a  man 
in  the  sense  of  the  imagination :  all  the  images  he 
uses  are  drawn  from  Nature,  and  are  highly  poeti- 
cal ;  they  fit  in  with  the  images  of  Ariel.  Caliban 
gives  us  images  from  the  earth,  Ariel  images  from 
the  air.  .  .  .  No  mean  figure  is  employed  (by  Cali- 
ban), no  mean  passion  displayed,  beyond  animal 
passion  and  repugnance  to  command."  ^ 

I  would  not  have  my  readers  think  that  I  pro- 
pose a  comparison  between  Lord  Byron  and  Cali- 
ban,—  a  comparison  which  would  be  no  less  im- 
pertinent than  artificial,  and  which,  if  Byron  were 
still  capable  of  wrath,  must  needs  rouse  him  to  an 
anger  beside  which  the  fabled  ire  of  Juno  would 
seem  tame.  And  yet  —  and  yet,  the  words  of  Cole- 
ridge haunt  us.  When  we  set  Byron  and  Shelley 

*  Lectures  upon  Shakespeare  and  Miltotij  Lecture  IX. 


108  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

side  by  side,  this  Caliban- Ariel  picture  will  recur. 
One  seems  '^  a  sort  of  creature  of  the  earth "  as 
the  other  is  "  a  sort  of  creature  of  the  air."  This 
creature  of  the  earth  is  moreover  "in  some  respects 
a  noble  being ;  the  images  he  uses  are  drawn  from 
Nature  and  are  highly  poetical."  Few  mean  figures 
are  employed,  few  mean  passions  displayed  "beyond 
animal  passion  and  repugnance  to  command."  The 
secret  of  Byron's  perversity  is  to  be  sought  in  the 
strength  of  his  passions,  and  in  an  idea  of  freedom 
which  would  defy  all  constituted  authority,  whether 
of  a  king  above  him  or  a  society  about  him,  in  the 
interests  of  an  untrammelled  individualism.  It  is 
here  that  the  reader  has  an  abundant  right  to  ask, 
"  Did  not  Shelley  show  an  equal  perversity  ?  Was 
not  his  first  publication  which  attracted  notice  a 
pamphlet  upon  the  ^  Necessity  of  Atheism,'  and  is 
not  the  very  '  Prometheus  Unbound,'  which  has 
just  been  cited  to  the  disadvantage  of  Byron,  a  poem 
of  rebellion  and  negation  ? "  To  which  I  answer : 
No  doubt  Shelley  thought  himself  to  be  an  atheist; 
no  doubt  he  was  expelled  from  college  for  his  sup- 
posedly atheistic  pamphlet ;  no  doubt  the  "  Pro- 
metheus "  is  a  poem  of  revolt.  As  little  can  it  be 
denied  that  Shelley  was  a  very  iconoclast  among 
the  sacred  social  conventions  of  his  time,  smashing, 
along  with  much  trash  and  lumber,  some  very  pre- 
cious vases  filled  with  priceless  ointment.  He,  too, 
often  spoke  and  acted  as  though  freedom  consisted 
primarily  in  absence  of  control,  whether  by  consti- 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  109 

tuted  authority  above,  society  around,  or  self  within. 
Yet  none  can  read  the  man's  life,  note  the  impres- 
sion which  he  has  made  upon  high-minded  men  and 
women  of  his  own  and  later  times,  and  study  his 
work,  after  making  due  allowance  for  the  imma- 
turity of  "  Queen  Mab  "  and  the  eariy  pamphlets, 
without  a  consciousness  of  the  essential  rightness 
of  purpose  which  not  only  persisted  but  grew 
through  the  thirty  turbulent  years.  It  is  a  strange 
story,  this  of  the  poet's  impetuous,  contradictory, 
unsatisfying  life.  The  three  short  decades  were  long 
enough  for  tragedy  and  comedy,  purity  and  what 
society  at  least  called  lewdness,  reverence  and  a 
most  unholy  boldness,  to  mingle  in  seemingly  inex- 
tricable confusion.  Every  person  is  a  mystery  pass- 
ing our  power  of  definition.  In  Shelley's  case  the 
mystery  is  so  deep  that  I  for  one  would  contem- 
plate it  with  a  wonder  as  little  mingled  as  may  be 
with  curiosity. 

A  sympathetic  critic  has  remarked  that  Shelley 
carried  the  Protestant  spirit  to  its  ultimate  ex- 
treme. "He  was,  moreover,  in  haste;  he  could 
not  rest  in  a  doubt,  he  could  not  suspend  his  judge- 
ment, he  could  not  wait  for  fuller  knowledge."  * 
This  is  well  said.  Whatever  Shelley  thought,  he 
was  impelled  to  say,  without  waiting  to  bring  his 
theory  to  the  test  of  the  world's  previous  experi- 
ence to  see  whether  it  possessed  the  notes  of  truth 
or  not.  Perceiving  some  of  the  limitations  and  in- 

*  G.  E.  Woodberry,  Makers  of  Literature^  p.  188. 


no    '  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

felicities  of  the  current  orthodoxy,  he  must  needs 
rush  into  callow  print  with  an  essay  whose  title 
absurdly  overstated  his  real  position.  Although 
free,  as  it  would  seem,  from  taint  of  low  sensuality, 
and  impressing  some  who  knew  him  well  with  a 
conviction  of  his  essential  purity,  he  yet  held  and 
practised  views  about  marriage  which  were  bound 
to  be  as  subversive  of  decent  society  as  they  were 
fatal  to  his  own  individual  peace.  Let  those  who 
complain  of  the  sordidness  of  the  commonplace 
family  relation  re-read  the  story  of  Shelley's  fool- 
ish marriage  with  Harriet  Westbrook,  his  elopement 
with  Mary  Godwin,  his  absurd  yet  apparently  hon- 
est suggestion  that  the  two  women  live  as  friends 
and  neighbours,  the  natural  suffering  and  not  un- 
natural suicide  of  Harriet,  and  the  blight  which 
the  whole  hopeless  complication  brought  upon 
Shelley's  later  life,  and  say  whether,  after  all,  the 
elder  fashion,  wrought  out  of  long  centuries  of 
human  experience,  whereby  a  man  and  woman  are 
joined  for  better  for  worse  until  death  part  them, 
have  not  much  to  commend  it  even  in  a  day  of 
revolution.  However  ^  sordid '  the  common  lot  of 
husband,  wife,  and  children  may  be,  it  assumes  a 
halo  of  grace  as  well  as  dignity  when  contrasted 
with  these  pitiable  details  of  weariness,  infelicity, 
unfaithfulness,  controversy  over  the  custody  of  chil- 
dren, and  the  sorry  train  of  crimination  and  re- 
crimination which  has  dragged  itself  over  almost  a 
century  of  English  letters  in  the  case  of  Shelley. 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  111 

The  poet's  general  integrity  of  life  and  honesty  of 
speech  are  not  to  be  gainsaid.  His  utterances  in 
behalf  of  '  freedom '  would  carry  greater  weight, 
however,  if  they  could  be  cleared  of  the  suspicion 
that  once  at  least  the  zeal  of  his  preaching  was 
heightened  by  a  desire  to  practise. 

The  significance  of  his  life  does  not  require  the 
justification  of  this  miserable  and  essentially  un- 
justifiable episode  in  it.  One  does  not  need  to  prove 
that  Shelley  was  one  of  the  best  of  men  in  order  to 
substantiate  his  claim  to  a  place  in  the  chief  choir 
of  English  singers,  or  in  the  company  of  those  who 
have  uplifted  and  inspired  the  moral  nature  of  their 
fellows.  Here,  once  more,  is  to  be  noted  the  catho- 
licity of  inspiration.  Precisely  as  it  is  one  of  man's 
prerogatives  to  rise  not  merely  in  spite  of,  but  by 
means  of,  the  forces  which  oppose  him,  so  the  flame 
of  the  Spirit  seems  sometimes  enhanced  in  brilliancy 
through  its  ability  to  conquer  and  feed  upon  the 
very  things  that  might  have  been  expected  to  quench 
it.  "Art  for  art's  sake"  is  so  poor  a  member  of 
the  family  of  cant  phrases  that  we  wonder  at  its 
vitality.  Yet,  like  most  cant  phrases,  it  contains  an 
element  of  truth,  in  its  recognition  of  the  fact  that 
God  can  often  find  place  and  use  for  agents  which 
society  must  reject.  Art  is  for  life's  sake ;  but  the 
Spirit  of  Truth  and  Beauty,  from  whose  inspiration 
all  art  proceeds,  does  not  necessarily  contemn  an 
instrument  because  it  seems  little  adapted  to  the 
purposes  of  life  in  general.  Man  has  made  as  yet 


112  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

such  halting  development  that  we  rarely  find  a 
representative  of  the  race  big  enough  to  bear  the 
consciousness  of  unusual  powers  and  gifts  without 
being  thrown  into  unstable  social  equilibrium  by 
it.  The  man  of  genius  is  likely  to  be  so  intense  an 
individualist  as  to  be  a  very  indifferent  member  of 
society.  His  service  is  not  therefore  to  be  judged 
by  a  special  rule.  He  is  simply  to  be  treated  with 
the  same  large  charity  which  alone  can  make  human 
relations  tolerable  in  common  life.  To  proclaim  his 
absolution  from  the  ordinary  obligations  of  the 
family  and  community  simply  because  of  his  singu- 
lar endowment  as  a  man,  is  as  self-contradictory 
and  absurd  as  to  excuse  a  fountain  for  playing 
muddy  water,  on  the  ground  of  its  singular  distinc- 
tion of  design.  It  may  be  plausibly  contended  that 
the  design  of  the  fountain  is  a  matter  quite  apart 
from  the  quality  of  the  water,  and  that  the  fountain 
would  be  no  less  a  work  of  beauty  and  delight 
though  it  played  ink ;  which  is  half,  and  perhaps 
three  quarters,  true.  None  the  less  a  base  or  per- 
verted product  is  bound  eventually  to  obscure  the 
distinction  of  the  misused  means,  either  by  debas- 
ing, disfiguring,  or  destroying  them.  Poets  and 
artists  are  born  to  see  truth  and  beauty  and  then 
to  interpret  them  truly  and  beautifully.  Squinting 
or  astigmatic  eyes  have  never  been  regarded  as 
other  than  disadvantages  to  them.  Strabismic  moral 
vision  is  quite  as  little  likely  to  enhance  their  power 
or  the  quality  of  their  interpretation  of  Nature. 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  113 

Nor  can  men  be  trusted  to  reflect  the  truth  and 
beauty  of  life  who  themselves  utterly  fail  to  fulfil 
their  own  manhood.  Their  art  is  in  grave  danger 
of  infection  from  their  debility  of  character.  This 
is  not  to  claim  for  a  moment  that  great  natures 
are  to  be  crammed  into  little  moulds  or  judged  by 
merely  conventional  standards.  One  of  their  chief 
services  is  to  show  men  how  petty  and  inadequate 
such  moulds  and  standards  are.  But  the  question 
as  to  their  fulfilment  of  some  worthy  manhood  is  a 
fair  one,  because  it  bears  directly  in  the  great  ma- 
jority of  cases  upon  their  ability  to  see  and  tell  the 
truth,  and  scarcely  less  upon  the  trustworthiness 
and  probably  permanence  of  their  ideas  of  beauty. 
Hence  the  possession  of  the  fundamental  virtues 
of  courage,  reverence,  simplicity  and  purity  of  heart 
are  of  moment  to  the  poet.  None  will  venture  to 
question  Shelley's  moral  and  physical  courage; 
while  his  simplicity  —  a  childlike  simplicity  and 
freedom  from  affectation,  which  sometimes  led  him 
into  strange  and  ludicrous  adventures  —  is  as  little 
to  be  gainsaid.  There  is  no  lack  of  those  who  will 
deny  outright,  upon  the  other  hand,  his  claim  to 
any  semblance  of  reverence,  and  who  stand  ready 
to  cast  grave  doubts  upon  his  cleanness  of  heart. 
They  will  cite  his  attitude  toward  Christianity  and 
toward  his  father  in  support  of  their  former  claim, 
and  buttress  their  position  by  reference  to  the 
notes  to  "  Queen  Mab."  To  substantiate  the  latter 
they  will  have  recourse  to  Shelley's  abandonment 


114  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  Harriet  Westbrook,  his  elopement  with  Mary 
Godwin,  his  susceptibiHty  to  the  influence  of  Emi- 
lia Viviani,  who  inspired  the  "  Epipsychidion/'  and 
some  passages  in  his  poems,  most  notably,  perhaps, 
the  original  scheme  of  "  Laon  and  Cythna,"  which 
made  the  two  brother  and  sister,  and  the  sixth  canto 
of  the  same  poem  as  it  was  finally  published  under 
the  title  of  "  The  Revolt  of  Islam."  This  evidence 
is  not  to  be  altogether  rebutted ;  but  on  the  other 
hand  a  clear  and  charitable  view  of  all  the  circum- 
stances of  the  poet's  life  goes  far  toward  temper- 
ing and  mitigating  it.  Shelley  impressed  competent 
judges,  I  repeat,  as  a  man  of  singular  purity  of 
thought  and  life.  He  could  not  endure  obscene  or 
suggestive  stories,  and  seems  to  have  felt  all  a 
gentleman's  natural  aversion  to  the  Irishman,  Cur- 
ran,  because  of  the  part  which  they  played  in  his 
conversation.  His  verse,  moreover,  while  eminently 
sensuous  at  times,  is  upon  the  whole  singularly  free 
from  taint  of  sensuality.  Shelley  was  no  disem- 
bodied spirit,  as  he  is  sometimes  represented  to  have 
been ;  but  a  man  of  vigourous  (and  awkward)  phy- 
sique, after  the  early  threats  of  pulmonary  trouble 
had  been  outlived.  He  loved  bathing,  boating,  rid- 
ing, pistol-shooting,  though  reckless  and  somewhat 
inefficient  in  them  all.  His  target  practice  was  a 
menace  to  his  friends,  his  bathing  put  his  life  in 
frequent  jeopardy,  and  his  yachting  finally  ended 
it.  Characteristically  enough,  he  entered  heartily 
into  the  spirit  of  these  sports,  but  persisted  in  ig- 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  115 

noring  their  physical  conditions  and  requirements. 
Getting  once  beyond  his  depth  in  Arno,  he  lay  per- 
fectly quiet  at  the  bottom  of  a  pool,  until  fished  out 
by  Trelawny ;  and  then,  upon  catching  his  breath, 
greeted  his  rescuer  in  this  wise :  — 

"  I  always  find  the  bottom  of  the  well,  and  they 
say  Truth  lies  there.  In  another  minute  I  should 
have  found  it,  and  you  would  have  found  an  empty 
shell.  .  .  .  Death  is  the  veil,  which  those  who  live 
call  life :  they  sleep  and  it  is  lifted."  ^ 

Such  an  incident  suggests  the  impossibility  of 
judging  the  man  by  ordinary  standards;  not  be- 
cause his  extraordinary  parts  grant  him  immunity, 
but  because  the  basis  upon  which  ordinary  judge- 
ment can  rest  is  lacking  as  really,  if  not  as  com- 
pletely, as  in  the  case  of  an  insane  person.  So  it 
must  be  considered  that,  while  Shelley  was  inexcus- 
ably guilty  in  deserting  his  first  wife  for  Mary 
Godwin,  there  is  some  reason  to  suppose  that  evi- 
dence may  yet  be  forthcoming  which  would  have 
justified  separation  if  not  divorce  ;  his  theories  con- 
cerning marriage — theories  which  none  can  doubt 
he  held  with  perfect  honesty  —  are  to  be  taken  into 
account,  and  it  must  be  remembered  further  that, 
barring  this  lapse,  Shelley  impresses  the  reader  of 
to-day,  as  he  impressed  his  companions,  as  a  man 
chaste  in  act,  speech,  and  thought.  He  believed 
that  the  facts  of  experience  must  be  faced,  and  that 
even  the  most  shocking  facts  are  legitimate  material 

»  Trelawny's  Recollections  of  Shelley  and  Byron,  p.  40. 


116  ENGLISH  LITEKATURE 

for  literary  treatment.  Granting  such  justification 
for  the  subject  of  a  tragedy  like  "  The  Cenci,"  it  is 
hard  to  see  how  nameless  outrage  could  be  treated 
■with  higher  reserve,  or  finer  feeling  for  the  decencies 
as  well  as  for  the  genuine  tragedies  of  life. 

Shelley's  claim  to  the  possession  of  reverence  is 
not  less  the  subject  of  conflicting  testimony.  His 
treatment  of  his  father  was  bad,  though  Sir  Timo- 
thy is  so  grotesquely  Philistine  a  figure,  with  his 
merely  formal  morality,  his  conventional  religion, 
his  confidence  in  the  protection  of  the  "exalted 
mind  "  of  the  Duke  of  Norfolk,  and  all  the  rest  of 
it,  as  to  foreordain  that  the  two  should  never  under- 
stand each  other.  There  is  a  something  half  ludi- 
crous, half  pathetic,  about  his  proposition  to  read 
"  Palley's  "  (so  he  called  the  name)  "  Natural  The- 
ology "  with  his  son,  in  hope  of  converting  him 
from  the  views  of  "  The  Necessity  of  Atheism " 
and  the  notes  to  "  Queen  Mab."  How  far  this  in- 
fluence could  go  in  the  direction  of  integrity  of 
faith  and  life  may  be  judged  from  the  pretty  well 
authenticated  belief  that  at  the  same  time  he  was 
assuring  Shelley  of  his  implacability  toward  any 
mesalliance  on  his  part,  but  of  his  entire  readiness 
to  provide  for  the  issue  of  any  irregular  connections 
he  might  form.^  This  does  not  excuse,  though  it 
may  account  for,  the  language  of  disrespect  which 
at  times  the  poet  used  toward  his  father.  If  any 
excuse  is  to  be  made  it  must  rest  upon  Shelley's 

*  Cf.  J.  A.  Symonds,  Shelley ^  cbap.  i,  p.  6. 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  117 

later  possession  by  at  least  a  trace  of  the  mania 
of  distrust  and  fear  of  Sir  Timothy  which  certainly 
oppressed  one  period  of  his  boyhood.  Be  all  this 
as  it  may,  however,  the  secret  of  Shelley's  rever- 
ence and  irreverence  is  to  be  sought  in  the  words 
of  Orsino  in  "  The  Cenci " :  — 

"  Words  are  but  holy  as  the  deeds  they  cover : 
A  priest  who  has  forsworn  the  God  he  serves ; 
A  judge  who  makes  Truth  weep  at  his  decree  ; 

A  father  who  is  all  a  tyrant  seems, 
Were  the  prof aner  for  his  sacred  name."  ^ 

It  is  scarcely  too  much  to  say  that  Shelley's 
whole  life  with  all  his  work  must  be  brought  to  the 
test  of  this  passage  before  it  can  be  adequately 
understood.  "  The  Anarch  Custom  "  was  his  arch- 
enemy. Like  a  true  disciple  of  revolution,  he  was 
little  versed  in  history  and  had  no  taste  for  investi- 
gation into  custom's  growth.  He  could  never  realize 
the  extent  in  which  it  represents  the  aspirations, 
struggles,  and  achievements  of  earlier  generations, 
which,  to  be  sure,  have  hardened  into  relative  use- 
lessness,  like  the  bread  too  thickly  encrusted  in  the 
baking,  or  the  good  soil  of  the  footpath  worn  barren 
by  many  passing  feet.  Enough  for  him  to  feel  that 
custom  was  tyrannous  in  the  present ;  it  need  not  be 
generally  tyrannous ;  if  only  it  should  seem  oppres- 
sive in  specific  cases,  it  must  forthwith  be  arraigned, 
convicted,  and  most  eloquently  sentenced.  This  is 

*  The  Cencif  act  ii,  scene  2. 


118  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  open  secret  of  Shelley's  negative  influence,  his 
so-called  atheism,  irreverence,  and  immorality. 

Upon  the  other  hand  his  positive  doctrine,  in  the 
proclamation  of  which  he  is  very  bold  and  which 
will,  perhaps  in  his  own  despite,  give  him  a  perma- 
nent place  among  leaders  and  inspirers  of  religious 
and  social  thought,  may  be  suggested  by  a  passage 
from  the  preface  to  "  Alastor  "  :  — 

"  They  who,  deluded  by  no  generous  error,  .  .  . 
duped  by  no  illustrious  superstition,  loving  nothing 
on  this  earth  and  cherishing  no  hopes  beyond,  yet 
keep  aloof  from  sympathies  with  their  kind,  .  .  . 
these  and  such  as  they  have  their  apportioned  curse; 
.  .  .  they  are  morally  dead ;  they  are  neither  friends, 
nor  lovers,  nor  fathers,  nor  citizens  of  the  world, 
nor  benefactors  of  their  country.  .  .  .  Those  who 
love  not  their  fellow-beings  live  unfruitful  lives  and 
prepare  for  their  old  age  a  miserable  grave." 

Shelley  not  only  preached  this  doctrine  but  abun- 
dantly illustrated  it  in  practice.  The  "  regeneration 
of  mankind  "  was  not  only  the  theme  of  "  Laon " 
and  "  Prometheus,"  it  was  the  subject  of  the  poet's 
own  contemplation  day  by  day.  He  refused  on 
principle  the  proposition  of  his  father  and  grand- 
father to  entail  the  family  estates,  — worth  £20,000 
a  year  at  his  grandfather's  death,  —  although  his 
consent  would  have  brought  him  an  immediate  an- 
nual income  of  £2000,  and  his  need  was  pressing. 
He  was  a  persistent  and  sympathetic  visitor  among 
the  poor,  showing  at  times  a  far  more  practical  in- 


BYRON  AND   SHELLEY  119 

sight  into  the  true  conditions  of  distress  than  could 
have  been  expected.  Even  his  descent  upon  Ireland 
when  he  was  scarcely  twenty,  with  his  girl-wife, 
Harriet,  and  his  sister-in-law,  Eliza,  who  had  their 
common  stock  of  money  hid  in  some  nook  or  corner 
of  her  dress,  —  "  we  are  not  dependent  upon  her  al- 
though she  gives  it  out  as  we  want  it,"  he  says  with 
delicious  simplicity,  — and  his  "  Address  to  the  Irish 
People''  are  further  removed  from  farce-comedy 
than  appears  at  first  glance.  Among  the  physicians 
at  whose  hands  Ireland  has  suffered  so  many  things, 
none  was  ever  freer  from  taint  of  quackery  than 
this  impulsive  boy ;  nor  have  many  been  able  to 
furnish  a  prescription  better  related  to  the  funda- 
mental needs  of  a  distracted  people ;  though,  with  its 
insistence  upon  the  necessity  of  toleration,  calmness, 
mildness,  patience,  and  the  formation  of  "  habits  of 
Sobriety,  Regularity,  and  Thought,"  its  form  was  so 
ill  adapted  to  Irish  taste  as  to  leave  little  chance 
that  it  would  ever  be  taken/  Throuofh  all  his  works 
and  days  Shelley  seems  to  have  been  loyal  to  the 
resolution  taken  in  his  boyhood  at  Eton  as  he  heard 

From  the  near  school-room,  voices,  that  alas ! 
Were  but  one  echo  from  a  world  of  woes  — 
The  harsh  and  grating  strife  of  tyrants  and  of  foes. 

So  without  shame  I  spake  :  —  "I  will  be  wise, 
And  just,  and  free,  and  mild,  if  in  me  lies 
Such  power,  for  I  grow  weary  to  behold 

*  For  a  brief  abstract  of  this  Address  see  Symonds's  Shelley ^  chap. 


120  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  selfish  and  the  strong  still  tyrannize 
Without  reproach  or  check."  I  then  controlled 
My  tears,  my  heart  grew  calm,  and  I  was  meek  and  bold."  ^ 

It  is  only  in  the  light  of  this  intense  feeling  of 
hostility  to  tyranny,  of  sympathy  with  the  hopes  and 
fears  of  suffering  man,  and  of  faith  in  a  universe 
created  and  animated  by  such  a  Spirit  that  this 
human  struggle  must  finally  avail,  that  we  begin  to 
realize  Shelley's  testimony  to  the  place  and  power 
of  religion.  It  voices  itself  in  many  forms.  He  had 
a  keen  sense  for  the  mystery  of  things  and  that  im- 
pulse to  keep  putting  the  deepest  and  most  searching 
questions  to  life  which  is  the  essence  of  religion. 

Why  aught  should  fail  and  fade  that  once  is  shown ; 

Why  fear  and  dream  and  death  and  birth 

Cast  on  the  daylight  of  this  earth 

Such  gloom  ;  why  man  has  such  a  scope 

For  love  and  hate,  despondency  and  hope  !  * 

He  had,  too,  and  that  in  high  degree,  a  sense  of 
the  largeness  and  seriousness  of  life.  It  is  here  that 
his  ^  atheism '  shows  itself  to  be  far  more  deeply 
and  sincerely  religious  than  the  half -believing  cyni- 
cism of  Byron.  The  very  titles  that  the  two  poets 
chose  accentuate  the  contrast.  As  Mr.  Swinburne 
has  said  with  characteristic  assurance,  but  some- 
thing less  than  his  habitual  exaggeration :  — 

"  When  Shelley  threw  himself  upon  poetry  as  his 
organ,  his  topics  were  not  ^  Hours  of  Idleness,'  and 

1  The  Revolt  of  Islam,  Dedication,  stanzas  3  and  4. 
'  Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty. 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  121 

^  Hints  from  Horace/  and  ^  The  Waltz ' ;  they  were  the 
redemption  of  the  world  by  the  martyrdom  of  right- 
eousness, and  the  regeneration  of  mankind  through 
'  Gentleness,  Virtue,  Wisdom  and  Endurance ' ;  they 
were  the  heroism  of  Beatrice  and  the  ascension  of 
Adonais,  and  they  were  the  resurrection  of  Italy  and 
of  Greece,  and  they  were  the  divinest  things  of  na- 
ture, made  more  divine  through  the  interpretation 
of  love  infallible  and  the  mastery  of  insuperable 
song/'^ 

Moreover,  while  Shelley,  as  became  a  true  son  of 
revolution,  was  deficient  in  the  historic  sense  and  had 
little  appreciation  of  the  slow  but  sure  growth  of 
the  race  "  in  wisdom  and  stature  and  in  favour  with 
God  and  man,"  the  story  of  which  makes  the  Past 
sacred  and  every  real  history  a  book  of  revelation, 
he  did  have  in  a  more  or  less  dim  way  a  sense  of 
that  ultimate  wholeness  and  integrity  of  life  which 
is  the  root  idea  in  holiness.  Just  as  in  "  Alastor " 
he  sets  forth  the  inappeasable  hunger  of  his  soul  for 
the  key  and  secret  of  life,  so  in  the  "  Hymn  to  In- 
tellectual Beauty  "  he  communicates  to  us  something 
of  his  confidence  in  the  existence  of  a  Spirit,  which, 
living  at  the  heart  of  things,  has  power  to  reconcile 
life's  contradictions. 

Love,  hope,  and  self-esteem,  like  clouds  depart 

And  come,  for  some  uncertain  moments  lent. 
Man  were  immortal  and  omnipotent. 

Didst  thou,  unknown  and  awful  as  thou  art, 
Keep  with  thy  glorious  train  firm  state  within  his  heart. 

1  u  Wordsworth  and  Byron,"  Nineteenth  Century f  vol.  xv,  p.  609. 


122  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Along  each  of  these  convergent  Hnes  he  was  bring- 
ing his  burden  of  testimony  to  the  reality  of  religion 
as  a  prime  concern  of  man.  It  remained  in  a  lyrical 
drama  of  the  greatest  distinction  to  touch  the  heart 
of  the  Gospel. 

The  "  Prometheus  Unbound"  is  without  question 
a  poem  of  revolt ;  but  it  is  as  far  as  possible  from 
being  a  poem  of  negation.  On  the  contrary  it  sets 
forth,  somewhat  mystically  and  ideally  of  course,  or 
it  would  not  be  Shelley's,  the  necessary  and  inevi- 
table victory  of  the  vital  principle  of  Christianity. 
The  Jove  whose  reign  is  threatened  is  a  tyrant  seated 
upon  a  throne  of  irresponsible  and  unreasonable 
power.  Prometheus  is  the  Titan  whose  heart  has 
been  touched  by  the  sorrow  and  the  need  of  man, 
and  who  would  fain  deliver  him.  For  his  rebellion 
against  tyranny  and  his  refusal  even  when  van- 
quished to  give  in  his  allegiance  to  the  despot,  he 
is  chained  on  Caucasus  and  tormented  by  the  furies, 
who  come  — 

with  hydra  tresses, 
And  iron  wings  that  climb  the  wind. 

Thus  the  poem  deals  with  — 

Fate  and  Chance  and  God  and  Chaos  old, 
And  Love,  and  the  chained  Titan's  wof ul  doom, 
And  how  he  shall  be  loosed,  and  make  the  earth 
One  brotherhood. 

Prometheus  in  his  anguish  curses  Jove,  but  later, — 
and  this  is  a  touch  impossible,  I  think,  to  any  modern 


BYRON  AND   SHELLEY  123 

poet  except  Shelley,  — bethinking  himself  that  such 
tyranny  is  by  its  very  nature  doomed,  recants  his 
curse  and  finds  something  very  like  pity  filling  the 
void  in  his  heart  that  hate  has  made.  The  furies 
taunt  him  with  the  infernal  gospel  that  — 

Those  who  do  endure 
Deep  wrongs  for  man,  and  scorn,  and  chains,  but  heap 
Thousand-fold  torment  on  themselves  and  him. 

They  mock  him  further  with  their  picture  of  the 
confusion  and  hopelessness  of  the  world's  affairs :  — 

The  good  want  power,  but  to  weep  barren  tears. 
The  powerful  goodness  want :  worse  need  for  them. 
The  wise  want  love  ;  and  those  who  love  want  wisdom  ; 
And  all  best  things  are  thus  confused  to  ill. 

Through  it  all  Prometheus  endures  with  heavenly 
patience,  saying,  — 

"  And  yet  I  feel 
Most  vain  all  hope  but  love.  .  .  . 

...  I  would  fain 
Be  what  it  is  my  destiny  to  be, 
The  saviour  and  the  strength  of  suffering  man." 

I  may  not  stop  to  sketch  in  Shelley's  words,  as  I 
should  like  to  do,  the  coming  of  Demogorgon,  "  a 
tremendous  gloom,"  before  whom  the  tyrant  sit- 
ting upon  his  seat  of  injustice  trembles  and  falls. 
Jupiter  has  been  rejoicing  in  sheer  power. 

"  All  else  has  been  subdued  to  me  ;  alone 
The  soul  of  man,  hke  unextinguished  fire, 
Yet  burns  toward  heaven  with  fierce  reproach,  and  doubt, 
And  lamentation,  and  reluctant  prayer, 
Hurling  up  insurrection,  which  might  make 


124  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Our  antique  empire  insecure,  though  built 
On  eldest  faith,  and  hell's  coeval,  fear." 

Finally,  before  the  power  of  love  working  by  faith, 
of  love  incarnate  in  a  great  nature  making  willing 
sacrifice  of  self  for  man,  of  love  joined  to  Eter- 
nity,* that  tyranny  is  overthrown,  fear  has  its  sting 
plucked  away, — 

And  Conquest  is  dragged  captive  through  the  deep. 

But  I  hope  to  have  sketched  the  great  poem  in 
sufficient  outline  to  indicate  how  far  it  is  from 
being  a  work  of  mere  negation  and  how  immedi- 
ately related  it  is  to  Christianity.  A  poem  of  re- 
volt it  may  indeed  be  called;  but  it  is  revolt 
against  the  tyranny  of  mechanical  mythologies  and 
ecclesiasticisms ;  against  theories  of  atonement,  if 
one  pleases,  which  would  represent  Christ  as  com- 
ing to  deliver  man  from  a  fierce  and  savage  God. 

Precisely  as  the  other  poems  depict  the  hunger 
of  the  mind  after  some  source  of  efficient  and 
beneficent  control  in  the  world's  affairs, — a  hun- 
ger which  Beatrice  voices  when  she  expresses  her 
despair:  — 

"  If  there  should  he 
No  God,  no  Heaven,  no  Earth  in  the  void  world ; 
The  wide,  grey,  lampless,  deep,  unpeopled  world !  " 

SO  the  "  Prometheus "  sets  forth  the  appeal  which 
the  sacrifice   of   Christ   made   to  Shelley's  heart, 

*  I  believe  that  this  interpretation  of  the  stupendous  figure  of 
Demogorgon  comports  best  with  the  general  scheme  of  the  drama. 


BYRON  AND  SHELLEY  125 

however  unwilling  he  may  have  been  to  express  it 
in  terms  of  conventional  piety.  How  compelling 
this  appeal  was  in  some  of  its  aspects  is  witnessed 
further  by  the  memorable  chorus  from  "Hellas":  — 

A  power  from  the  unknown  God, 

A  Promethean  conqueror,  came ; 
Like  a  triumphal  path  he  trod 
The  thorns  of  death  and  shame. 

A  mortal  shape  to  him 

Was  like  the  vapour  dim 
Which  the  orient  planet  animates  with  light. 

Hell,  sin,  and  slavery  came, 

Like  blood-hounds  mild  and  tame 
Nor  preyed  until  their  Lord  had  taken  flight. 

The  moon  of  Mahomet 

Arose,  and  it  shall  set : 
While,  blazoned  as  on  heaven's  immortal  noon, 

The  Cross  leads  generations  on. 

When  this  stanza  is  put  beside  the  one  which 
follows  it  with  a  lament  over  the  dispeopling  of 
hills,  streams,  and  woods  of  their  ancient  divinities, 
the  reader  begins  to  feel  the  significance  of  Shel- 
ley's religious  instinct.  He  was  in  revolt  against 
an  idea  of  religion  which  made  God  a  despot;  he 
felt,  on  the  other  hand,  the  appeal  of  a  faith  which 
made  Love  not  a  mere  sentiment  of  good-nature, 
but  an  impulse  of  sacrifice, — a  vital  and  regnant 
force  in  the  world.  He  was  quite  as  truly  repelled 
by  an  idea  of  religion  which  robbed  the  earth  of 
its  soul  and  expelled  divinity  to  heaven ;  he  had  a 
sure  instinct  for  that  Divine  Principle  which  works 


126  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  men  and  things  to  will  and  to  do  of  His  good 
pleasure :  — 

.  .  .  that  sustaining  Love 
Which,  through  the  web  of  being  blindly  wove 
By  man  and  beast  and  earth  and  air  and  sea, 
Burns  bright  or  dim,  as  each  are  mirrors  of 
The  fire  for  which  all  thirst,  now  beams  on  me, 
Consuming  the  last  clouds  of  cold  mortality.^ 

No  claim  that  Shelley  ever  organized  his  reli- 
gious instinct  and  thought  into  a  system  is  made 
or  could  be  maintained;  but  none  the  less  the 
witness  of  much  that  he  wrote  is  all  the  more  sig- 
nificant, because  it  testifies  unconsciously  to  man's 
need  of  a  Divinity  Whose  activities  shall  be  as 
closely  identified  with  the  common  concerns  of 
humanity  and  nature,  as  His  being  and  attributes 
transcend  them. 

'  Adonais. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  "Edinburgh"  and  the  "quarterly" 

To  attempt  a  chapter  upon  the  religious  element 
in  the  work  of  the  writers  for  whom  this  title 
stands  may  seem  like  undertaking  an  essay  upon  the 
Greek  Kalends  or  the  seacoast  of  Bohemia.  The 
reader's  first  thought  is  likely  to  be  that,  whatever 
may  have  been  the  personal  religious  convictions  of 
these  men,  their  published  works  have  "  no  religion 
to  speak  of  " ;  certainly  no  religious  significance  for 
a  later  day.  Has  not  Mr.  Bagehot  specifically  noted 
the  fact? 

"  A  curious  abstinence  from  religious  topics  [he 
says]  characterizes  the  original  Review.  There  is  a 
wonderful  omission  of  this  most  natural  topic  of 
speculation  in  the  lives  of  Horner  and  Jeffrey.  In 
truth,  it  would  seem  that,  living  in  the  incessant 
din  of  a  Calvinistic  country,  the  best  course  for 
thoughtful  and  serious  men  was  to  be  silent  —  at 
least  they  instinctively  thought  so.  They  felt  no 
involuntary  call  to  be  theological  teachers  them- 
selves, and  gently  recoiled  from  the  coarse  admoni- 
tion around  them."  ^ 

Yet  Bagehot  has  himself  answered  his  own  im- 

^  Bagehot,  "The  First  Edinburgh  Reviewers,"  Literary  Studies, 
Tol.  i,  pp.  183-184. 


128  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

plied  question;  for  in  a  memorable  estimate  and 
criticism  of  the  Whig  character  in  the  essay  just 
quoted,  he  has  frequent  recourse  to  the  similes, 
figures,  and  general  language  of  religion  for  the 
illustration  of  his  theme.  This  necessity  has  its 
ground  in  nature ;  since  all  great  intellectual,  moral, 
and  political  movements  have  their  religious  impli- 
cations, and  the  literary  awakening  of  which  the 
"  Edinburgh "  and  "  Quarterly "  reviews,  with 
"Blackwood's  "  and  the  "  London  "  magazines  were 
the  fruit  was  preeminently  such  a  movement.  It 
was  either  inspired  on  the  one  hand  or  necessitated 
on  the  other  by  the  Revolution.  The  "  Edinburgh" 
was  as  natural  an  outcome  of  revolutionary  impulse 
as  the  "  St.  Bartholomew  of  Abuses  "  or  the  guillo- 
tine ;  as  the  "  Lyrical  Ballads"  or  the  "  Ode  to  Na- 
poleon "  ;  while  the  "  Quarterly  "  followed  as  logi- 
cally as  Napoleon  himself,  or  the  "Letters  on  a 
Regicide  Peace." 

After  a  hundred  years  it  seems  to  us  as  though 
the  Revolution  suffered  a  material  sea-change  in 
crossing  the  Channel.  Most  of  its  English  advo- 
cates have  long  since  found  their  places  among  the 
respectabilities  of  literature;  and  so  far  as  the 
changes  for  which  they  contended  can  be  called 
revolutionary  at  all,  it  is  revolution  clothed  and  in 
its  right  mind,  revolution  not  only  Anglicized  but 
be-Whigged,  that  they  represent.  It  did  not  seem 
so,  however,  to  English  and  Scots  men  of  letters  in 
the  first  decade  of  the  new  century. 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      129 
As  Hazlitt  put  it :  — 

**  There  was  a  mighty  ferment  in  the  heads  o£ 
statesmen  and  poets,  kings  and  people.  According 
to  the  prevailing  notion,  all  was  to  be  natural  and 
new.  Nothing  that  was  established  was  to  be  tol- 
erated. .  .  .  Kings  and  queens  were  dethroned  from 
their  rank  and  station  in  legitimate  tragedy  and 
epic  poetry,  as  they  were  decapitated  elsewhere. 
.  .  .  The  world  was  to  be  turned  topsy-turvy ;  and 
poetry,  by  the  good-will  of  our  Adam-wits,  was  to 
share  its  fate  and  begin  de  novo"  ^ 

This  represents,  however,  the  impending  change 
which  a  radical  like  Godwin  might  have  hoped  for, 
or  a  reactionary  like  Gifford  feared,  rather  than  the 
actual  state  of  the  case.  A  new  poetry  had  indeed 
arisen  with  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  to  which 
Byron  and  Shelley  had  imparted  a  distinctly  revo- 
lutionary character.  It  was  natural,  therefore,  that  a 
new  criticism  should  arise,  not  merely  of  literature, 
but  of  life  in  its  social  and  political  aspects;  and 
equally  natural  that  this  criticism  should  divide  it- 
self into  two  camps,  one  forward-looking  and  hope- 
ful, the  other  reactionary  and  doubtful. 

The  "  Edinburgh  "  and  "  Quarterly  "  reviews, 
dating  their  origin  from  1802  and  1809  respect- 
ively, stand  as  the  protagonists  of  these  two  forces. 
Late  in  the  next  decade  they  were  followed  by  two 
monthly  magazines,  one  of  which,  "  Blackwood's," 
has  for  ninety  years  maintained  a  great  conservative 

1   The  English  Poets,  Lecture  VIII. 


130  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

reputation  with  brilliant  success ;  while  the  other, 
known  as  the  "  London  Magazine,"  lived  a  life  so 
brief  and  chequered  as  scarcely  to  justify  mention 
in  company  with  its  three  contemporaries,  were  it 
not  for  the  significance  of  the  so-called  "  Cockney 
School "  of  writers,  whose  organ  it  practically  be- 
came. Among  the  first  Edinburgh  Reviewers  whom 
the  world  cares  to  remember  were  Horner,  Jeffrey, 
Brougham,  and  Sydney  Smith,  of  whom  I  take  the 
last  to  be,  upon  the  whole,  the  most  significant 
and  characteristic  figure  for  our  present  purpose. 
The  "  Quarterly "  numbered  Gifford,  Southey, 
Scott,  and  Lockhart  among  its  early  contributors, 
and  two  of  them  among  its  editors.  Preeminent  in 
the  "Blackwood's"  group  were  Lockhart,  Wilson, 
and  Maginn.  The  "  London  "  could,  for  at  least  a 
brief  period,  look  to  a  company  of  writers  which 
comprised  Lamb,  De  Quincey,  Leigh  Hunt,^  Hood, 
and  Hazlitt. 

I  am  not  disposed  to  assume  the  judgement-seat 
and  to  divide  these  men  into  groups  of  believers 
and  unbelievers.  It  would  be  "  to  consider  too  curi- 
ously to  consider  so";  yet  critics  were  not  wanting 
in  their  own  day  to  undertake  the  task.  They  of 
course  saw  in  the  "  Quarterly  "  the  recognized  and 
confessed  champion  of  a  high  Tory  faith  in  Church 
and  State  as  then  established.  Each  number  of  the 
Review  as  it  issued  from  the  press  was  like  incense 

^  I  do  not  know  that  Leigh  Hunt  was  himself  a  contributor  ;  but 
he  was  in  close  association  with  those  who  were. 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      131 

in  the  nostrils  of  the  great  god,  Status  Quo.  The 
"  Edinburgh  "  was  the  organ,  not  of  revolution,  as 
its  "  Quarterly  "  rivals  would  have  it,  but  of  the 
new  Liberalism,  which  represented  in  some  degree 
the  effect  of  revolution  upon  independent  and 
courageous,  but  none  the  less  eminently  conserva- 
tive, British  minds.  In  both  politics  and  religion, 
the  blue  and  buff  of  the  "  Edinburgh  "  stood  for 
orthodoxy,  but  it  was  the  Whig  orthodoxy  of  rea- 
son rather  than  the  Tory  orthodoxy  of  tradition. 
"  Blackwood's,"  which  did  not  appear  until  the  im- 
mediate stress  of  the  great  French  wars  was  over, 
ranged  itself  on  the  Conservative  side ;  but,  as  be- 
came a  monthly  magazine  whose  purpose  was  to 
amuse  and  instruct  rather  than  to  argue,  defend,  or 
convert,  it  exercised  its  partisanship  after  a  some- 
what tricksy  and  irresponsible  fashion.  The  "  Lon- 
don Magazine  "  as  a  periodical  publication  would, 
as  I  have  intimated,  have  no  especial  claim  upon 
our  attention ;  but  the  Cockney  School,  which  it 
may  be  said  to  represent,  had  some  right  to  the 
name  of  radical.  Hunt  and  Hazlitt  held  admittedly 
unorthodox  opinions,  while  Lamb  and  De  Quincey, 
though  the  latter  aspired  to  be  a  defender  of  the 
current  religious  faith,  were  Hterary  innovators. 

Yet  the  reader  who  blows  the  dust  from  the  tops 
of  these  early  volumes  and  runs  his  eye  over  their 
pages  finds  himself  wondering  how  they  could  have 
made  so  great  a  stir.  Their  politics  are  sufficiently 
various,  but  their  references  to  religion  are  in  gen- 


132  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

eral  studiously  respectful  and  commonplace,  the 
single  exception  worth  noting  to-day  being  the  fa- 
mous Chaldee  Manuscript  article  in  "Blackwood's," 
which  takes  somewhat  daring  liberties  with  the 
phraseology  of  the  Book  of  Revelation.  A  brief 
glance  at  such  titles  as  relate  to  religious  topics  will 
illustrate  my  meaning.  The  first  volume  of  the 
"Edinburgh"  discusses  very  temperately  a  sermon 
by  Dr.  Parr,  and  William  Godwin's  reply  to  it.  It 
also  criticises  with  a  favour  in  which  the  note  of  calm 
reserve  seems  dominant,  Paley's  ^^  Natural  Theol- 
ogy." Only  when  Volume  III  undertakes  a  review 
of  Necker's  "  Cours  de  Morale  Religieuse  "  does  the 
tone  of  trenchant  criticism,  which  is  a  part  of  the 
"Edinburgh"  tradition,  sound  with  unmistakable 
clearness.  In  Volume  IV  the  sermons  of  a  certain 
Dr.  Brown  are  reviewed,  and  the  fact  that,  though 
a  Presbyterian,  he  has  seen  fit  to  dedicate  his  book 
to  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury,  is  selected  for 
especially  favourable  mention. 

The  record  for  the  early  volumes  of  the  "  Quar- 
terly "  is  almost  equally  colourless.  Volume  I  under- 
takes a  defence  of  the  "  Credibility  of  the  Jewish 
Exodus  .  .  .  against  Edward  Gibbon,  Esq.,"  which 
duly  reaches  its  foregone  conclusion.  Volume  II 
offers  more  religious  and  theological  variety,  in  two 
articles  which  review  in  an  excellent  spirit  "  The 
Transactions  of  the  Missionary  Society  in  the  South 
Sea  Islands  "  and  Paley's  "  Sermons  and  Memoirs  " ; 
while  a  third,  dealing  with  a  work  entitled  "  Intol- 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      133 

erance  the  Disgrace  of  Christians,  not  the  Fault  of 
their  Religion,"  sounds  the  Tory  note  with  greater 
distinctness.  The  Alexandrian  School  and  its  in- 
fluence upon  the  Established  Church  are  likewise 
discussed.  A  leader  of  the  Clapham  sect,  to  whom 
I  shall  have  occasion  to  recur  in  the  next  chapter, 
falls  under  review  in  Volume  IV,  where  a  fairly 
liberal  essay  may  be  found  dealing  with  "  Lord 
Teignmouth  and  the  British  and  Foreign  Bible 
Society."  It  is  evident  from  the  tone  of  this  article 
that  the  Society,  synonym  for  respectability  though 
it  has  since  become,  was  then  an  object  of  scorn 
and  derision  in  some  quarters  —  a  state  of  affairs 
fit  to  make  one  believe  Sydney  Smith's  claim  that 
he  once  heard  Jeffrey  speak  disrespectfully  of  the 
Equator. 

"  Blackwood's  "  first  volume  ^  begins  with  a  re- 
port of  the  proceedings  in  the  House  of  Commons 
upon  the  death  of  the  admirable  Francis  Horner, 
who  had  been  one  of  the  first  writers  in  the  "  Edin- 
burgh," and  is  as  generous  as  need  be.  Further  on 
it  reviews  favourably  the  work  of  Dr.  Chalmers  on 
"  Christian  Revelation  viewed  in  Connexion  with 
the  Modern  Astronomy  "  ;  and,  as  though  to  con- 
vince a  later  generation  that  there  is  nothing  new 
under  the  sun,  the  article  begins  with  the  lament  : 
"  One  of  the  worst  features  of  the  present  times  is 

*  I  refer  here  to  the  number  for  April,  1817,  some  months  before 
the  leadership  of  Lockhart  and  Wilson  began  its  real  career  with 
the  publication  of  the  Chaldee  Manuscript. 


134  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  separation  that  has  taken  place  between  science 
and  religion."  As  early  therefore  as  1817  this  ven- 
erable plaint  had  grown  familiar. 

It  must  be  evident  even  to  the  casual  reader  that 
the  religious  significance  of  these  publications  — 
if  indeed  they  have  any — lies  deeper  than  the 
rather  complexionless  titles  just  cited.  In  a  general 
way  it  may  be  maintained  that  in  religion  as  in 
politics  the  liberals  of  the  day  were  the  true  con- 
servatives, while  the  ultra-orthodox,  the  worship- 
pers of  tradition  and  the  status  quo,  were  in  un- 
conscious league  with  revolution.  This  is  simply  to 
state  a  general  proposition.  Even  if  the  Universe 
be  not  an  organism,  our  experience  of  it  is  such 
that  we  are  at  least  obliged  to  treat  it  as  though  it 
were.  The  great  interests  and  relations  of  men  as 
individuals  and  as  societies  seem  to  be  of  an  organic 
sort.  They  never  continue  in  one  stay.  Either  they 
avail  themselves  of  passing  opportunity  to  adapt 
their  frames  and  forms  to  their  environment,  as 
living  creatures  do  by  conquest  and  assimilation  of 
some  portion  of  circumstance ;  or  else  in  refusing 
to  do  this  they  become  themselves  the  food  of  cir- 
cumstance, —  their  vital  integrity  is  impaired ;  time 
and  the  hour  have  their  will  of  them.  The  phrase 
^  adaptation  to  environment '  is  itself  a  partial  and 
faulty  one,  because  the  process  of  life  is  in  so  real 
a  sense  mutual.  The  organism  endures,  not  by  a 
mere  slavish  adaptation  of  self  to  surroundings,  but 
quite  as  truly  by  an  adaptation  of  surroundings  to 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      135 

the  interests  of  self.  This  is  true  even  in  organisms 
of  the  lowest  sort ;  while  as  we  go  up  the  scale  and 
the  mystery  of  will  develops,  the  domestication  and 
cultivation  of  otherwise  hostile  or  savage  surround- 
ings becomes  a  prime  factor  in  organic  history. 
The  organism  which  exerts  its  power  to  put  com- 
pulsion upon  events,  thus  organizing  inevitable 
change  in  the  interests  of  life,  not  only  lives  but 
grows.  The  organism  which  through  feebleness, 
sloth,  obduracy,  or  lack  of  faith  declines  this  task 
does  not  thereby  inhibit  change.  It  simply  becomes 
its  unwilling  victim,  and  invites  its  approach  in  a 
hostile  guise. 

The  Tory  attitude  was  one  of  formal  and  ultra 
conservatism,  based,  as  one  trenchant  critic  has 
said,  on  "  genuine,  honest,  craven  fear."  Lord 
Eldon  has  been  generally  recognized  as  its  most 
characteristic  exponent.  His  regard  for  the  past 
was  less  that  of  an  intelligent  student  of  history 
bent  upon  appropriating  its  lessons  for  the  future, 
than  that  of  a  blind  worshipper  of  the  thing  that 
was,  because  it  had  been,  because  life  had  proved 
tolerable  —  at  least  for  him  as  an  individual  —  in 
connection  with  it,  and  because  the  least  change 
might  serve  to  loosen  the  keystone  of  the  arch 
spanning  the  deep  of  chaos.  When  Sir  Samuel 
Romilly  proposed  to  mitigate  the  savage  criminal 
code  that  prescribed  death  for  over  two  hundred 
offences,  he  was  frankly  told  that  there  was  no  tell- 
ing where  such  a  course  would  end.  If  he  sue- 


136  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ceeded  in  abolishing  the  death  penalty  for  picking 
pockets,  there  was  nothing  to  prevent  a  similar  step 
in  favour  of  the  thief  who  stole  cloth  from  a  bleach- 
field  ;  and  so  on  indefinitely,  until  the  gallows 
should  rot,  the  hangman  starve,  and  society  disin- 
tegrate. "I  am  for  hanging  all,"  was  the  memo- 
rable retort  of  one  young  squire  to  some  new  pro- 
posal of  this  apostle  of  mercy  and  justice.  It  was 
the  shortest  way,  and  it  is  ever  a  characteristic  of 
"  Hell's  coeval,  fear  "  to  deal  hurriedly  with  symp- 
toms rather  than  dare  a  genuine  investigation  into 
causes. 

No  very  penetrating  insight  is  needed  to  discover 
how  revolutionary  such  a  course  is  bound  to  prove. 
It  tends  towards  death  and  destruction,  like  every 
path  where  fear  and  doubt  are  guides,  because  it 
inhibits  the  one  absolutely  necessary  function  of 
life;  since  life  means  perpetual  change  in  the  adap- 
tation of  means  to  the  ends  of  its  own  continu- 
ance. While  the  tree  lives  its  innate  vital  principle 
enables  it  to  feed  upon  'weather.'  As  soon  as  its 
trunk  is  felled,  every  alternation  of  heat  and  cold, 
moist  and  dry,  becomes  the  enemy  of  its  fabric 
and  hastens  its  decay.  True  conservatism  consists, 
therefore,  not  in  fending  off  change,  but  in  foster- 
ing vitality  and  welcoming  all  change  that  accords 
with  it. 

The  mere  radical,  on  the  other  hand,  is  in  danger 
of  falling  in  love  with  change  for  its  own  sake  and 
of   rendering  as  superstitious  a  reverence  to  the 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      137 

sword  and  ploughshare  as  his  neighbour  accords  to 
the  symbols  of  settled  order.  So  far  from  looking 
back  to  the  past  and  wishing  to  perpetuate  its  con- 
ditions, he  forgets  that  there  has  been  any  past,  or, 
if  he  remembers,  it  is  only  with  a  sort  of  scorn  and 
hatred.  Things  seem  to  him  to  be  so  bad  that  mend- 
ing them  would  be  a  waste  of  time ;  he  would  rather 
build  anew  from  the  foundations.  He  neglects  two 
great  facts.  One  is  that  all  the  foundation  upon 
which  he  has  to  build  comes  out  of  this  very  past  of 
which  he  is  so  contemptuous.  The  other  is  that  he 
himself  is  more  often  ruled  by  hatred  of  what  is 
than  by  love  of  what  might  be,  and  thus  envy, 
malice,  and  uncharitableness  are  bound  to  obscure 
the  clearness  of  his  vision.  He  can  build  nothing 
that  will  stand  until  his  astigmatism  and  strabismus 
are  corrected. 

Here  as  elsewhere  the  Via  Media  is  the  practi- 
cable way  because  it  is  based  upon  the  truth  of  ex- 
perience and  lighted  by  the  fundamental  virtues 
of  faith,  hope,  and  love.  It  doubtless  loses  some- 
thing in  distinction,  because  it  is  so  often  the  way 
of  prudence  and  caution.  The  ultra-conservative 
clinging  to  the  outgrown  raiment  of  an  elder  time 
is  a  more  conspicuous  and  a  far  more  romantic 
figure  than  the  plain  man  in  modern  clothes  going 
about  to-day's  business.  The  ultra-radical  makes  a 
similar  appeal  to  the  spirit  of  untried  adventure, 
and  always  strikes  a  responsive  chord  in  some 
hearts.  The  weakness  of   the  former  lies  in   his 


138  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

cynicism  and  selfishness ;  that  of  the  latter  in  his 
bitterness.  Both  lack  faith.  One  is  contemptuous 
of  past  and  future  both,  and  of  man's  ability  to 
profit  by  them.  The  other  is  contemptuous  of  his- 
tory and  discerns  in  its  successive  stages  of  ex- 
perience barriers  to  human  happiness,  instead  of 
platforms  by  means  of  which  the  fabric  of  human 
welfare  may  be  enlarged  and  confirmed. 

It  is  no  part  of  my  purpose  to  claim  that  any  of 
these  new  publications  proved  to  be  a  consistent 
embodiment  of  any  one  of  these  theories.  Political 
and  social  theories  are  rarely  perfectly  consistent, 
whether  they  be  good  or  bad ;  and  their  confessors 
are  pretty  sure  to  prove  in  practice  better  than  the 
worst  and  worse  than  the  best  of  their  creeds.  It 
was  so  in  the  period  of  which  we  speak.  The  Tory 
idea  meant  a  cynical  disregard  of  the  rights  of  the 
masses  in  the  interests  of  privilege ;  but  the  Tory 
party  was  not  lacking  in  high-minded  and  honour- 
able men,  as  will  be  abundantly  illustrated  in  the 
next  chapter.  The  Radicals  held  and  proclaimed 
views  that  seemed  subversive  of  society  and  religion ; 
but  did  not  always  cease,  therefore,  from  being  good 
husbands  and  fathers.  The  Whigs  maintained  the 
worth  of  freedom  ;  the  right  of  each  man  to  think, 
work,  and  worship  as  he  was  conscientiously  inclined 
to  do.  They  not  only  went  upon  the  theory  that 
these  rights  were  sacred  and  that  the  welfare  of 
society  was  bound  up  with  their  preservation,  but 
they  felt  half  instinctively  that  the  masses  of  men 


THE   EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      139 

were  destined  to  possess  an  increasing  influence  in 
government ;  and  they  strove,  not  always  without 
difficulty,  to  regard  this  future  with  hope.  Their 
main  concern,  theoretically,  was  the  application  to 
the  present  of  the  experience  of  the  past,  with  a 
view  to  the  amelioration  of  life's  conditions  in  the 
future.  It  is  to  be  noted,  however,  that  the  Whigs, 
although  in  possession  of  a  generous  creed,  were 
not  always  therefore  exempt  as  individuals  from 
social  and  political  prejudice  or  meanness  ;  while, 
when  it  came  to  literary  criticism.  Whig  and  Tory 
both  were  quite  capable  of  the  most  anarchic  indi- 
vidualism. The  whole  matter  has  been  admirably 
summed  up  by  Bagehot  in  his  famous  estimate  of 
the  Whig  ideal. 

"  The  first  wish  of  the  Whigs  is  to  retain  the 
constitution ;  the  second  —  and  it  is  of  almost  equal 
strength  —  is  to  improve  it.  They  think  the  body 
of  laws  now  existing  to  be,  in  the  main  and  in  its 
essence,  excellent;  but  yet  that  there  are  exceptional 
defects  which  should  be  remedied,  superficial  incon- 
sistencies that  should  be  corrected.  The  most  op- 
posite creed  is  that  of  the  skeptic,  who  teaches  that 
you  are  to  keep  what  is  because  it  exists  ;  not  from 
a  conviction  of  its  excellence,  but  from  an  uncer- 
tainty that  anything  better  can  be  obtained."  ^ 

It  is  hard  to  realize  at  this  distance  of  time  the 
real  conditions  which  the  Tories  sought  to  perpetu- 
ate and  the  Whigs  to  improve. 

*  Literary  Studies^  vol.  i,  p.  162. 


140  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"  To  appreciate  the  value  of  the  *  Edinburgh  Re- 
view' [says  Sydney  Smith],  the  state  of  England 
at  the  period  when  that  journal  began  should  be 
had  in  remembrance.  The  Catholics  were  not  eman- 
cipated. The  Corporation  and  Test  Acts  were  unre- 
pealed. The  game-laws  were  horribly  oppressive; 
steel-traps  and  spring-guns  were  set  all  over  the 
country ;  prisoners  tried  for  their  lives  could  have 
no  counsel.  Lord  Eldon  and  the  Court  of  Chancery 
pressed  heavily  on  mankind.  Libel  was  punished 
by  the  most  cruel  and  vindictive  imprisonments. 
The  principles  of  political  economy  were  little  un- 
derstood. The  laws  of  debt  and  conspiracy  were  on 
the  worst  footing.  The  enormous  wickedness  of  the 
slave-trade  was  tolerated.  A  thousand  evils  were  in 
existence  which  the  talents  of  good  and  noble  men 
have  since  lessened  or  removed  :  and  these  efforts 
have  been  not  a  little  assisted  by  the  honest  bold- 
ness of  the  '  Edinburgh  Review.'  "  ^ 

So  it  is  that  when  the  "  Edinburgh  "  for  July, 
1804,  published  the  article  entitled  "A  Concise 
Statement  of  the  Question  regarding  the  Abolition 
of  the  Slave  Trade,"  we  may  claim  that  a  distinctly 
religious  note  was  sounded  in  so  far  as  this  discus- 
sion ministered  directly  to  that  doing  of  justice  and 
love  of  mercy  which  are  of  the  essence  of  religion. 
Its  closing  paragraph  is  so  clear  and  wholesome 
that  at  the  risk  of  a  surfeit  of  quotation  I  venture 
to  cite  it. 

"It  appears  to  us,  in  short,  that  the  Parliament 
of  England  have  it  now  in  their  power  to  do  a  more 
*  Quoted  by  Bagehot,  op.  ci(.,  p.  156. 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      141 

magnificent  act  of  humanity  and  justice  than  was 
ever  before  in  the  gift  of  a  legislative  assembly ; 
and  that  by  this  one  law,  they  may,  without  injury 
to  their  country,  deliver  more  men  from  suffering 
and  exert  a  far  more  lasting,  extensive,  and  benefi- 
cial influence  on  the  fortunes  of  mankind,  than  by 
all  the  triumphant  campaigns  and  successful  nego- 
tiations of  a  century."  ^ 

I  would  not  assert  that  this  note  of  humanity 
and  magnanimity  is  consistently  characteristic  of 
the  "  Edinburgh  Review."  In  literary  matters,  as 
has  been  already  intimated,  it  was  not;  still,  wher- 
ever the  voice  of  Sydney  Smith  was  heard,  soon  or 
late  it  was  sure  to  be  sounded  with  a  clearness  and 
emphasis  which  could  not  be  ignored.  This  jocund 
parson,  with  his  fondness  for  good  living,  his  dis- 
like of  ^enthusiasm,'  and  his  contentment  with  the 
ways  of  the  world,  was  yet  after  all  a  sort  of  Great- 
heart  —  a  champion  of  the  oppressed,  and  a  guide 
along  the  way  to  the  Celestial  City.  He  was  not  so 
constituted  as  to  appreciate  Wesley  or  the  Metho- 
dists. He  probably  could  not  have  used  —  perhaps 
he  could  not  altogether  have  understood —  the  lan- 
guage of  Simeon  and  his  fellow  Evangelicals.  They 
on  their  side  might  have  claimed  that,  since  spiritual 
things  must  be  spiritually  discerned,  so  gross  and 
palpable  a  worldling  was  not  likely  to  see  very  far 
into  the  mysteries  of  faith.  Nor  would  they  have 
been  altogether  wrong.    The  man  was   doubtless 

*  Edinburgh  Review j  vol.  iv,  p.  486. 


142  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

blind  to  some  things  that  are  best  worth  seeing; 
but  it  is  no  less  true  that  he  was  spiritually  endowed 
with  a  courage,  a  capacity  for  self-sacrifice,  a  sym- 
pathy with  the  oppressed,  and  a  passion  (which  he 
would  very  likely  have  denied)  that  made  him  a 
sort  of  apostle  of  essential  Christianity.  Critics  have 
been  divided,  like  teeth,  into  incisors  and  molars, 
and  Sydney  Smith  included  in  the  latter  class.  How- 
ever true  this  may  be  with  reference  to  his  criticism, 
his  passion  for  righteousness  and  fairness  of  dealing 
was  of  the  molar  sort.  Its  processes  were  relatively 
deliberate,  as  compared  with  the  enthusiastic  pas- 
sion of  his  Methodist  contemporaries  for  souls ;  but 
a  passion  it  was  none  the  less.  Now  and  then  he 
recognized  its  existence  and  reverently  acknow- 
ledged its  source.  "If,"  he  said,  "you  ask  me  who 
excites  me,  I  answer  you,  it  is  that  Judge  Who  stirs 
good  thoughts  in  honest  hearts  —  under  Whose 
warrant  I  impeach  the  wrong,  and  by  Whose  help 
I  hope  to  chastise  it."  * 

It  is  difficult  to  think  of  a  prophet  as  ^ buxom'; 
yet  were  not  that  adjective  the  prerogative  of  ro- 
bust and  comfortable  women,  it  is  precisely  the 
word  which  one  would  choose  to  characterize,  not 
only  Sydney  Smith's  person  but  his  faith  as  it 
translated  itself  into  good  works  through  nearly 
two  generations.  His  championship  of  the  slave, 
his  valiant  exposure  of  the  awful  condition  of  mad- 
houses, or  hospitals  for  the  insane,  his  persistent 

»  Quoted  by  G.  W.  E.  Russell,  in  Sydney  Smith,  p.  225. 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      143 

claim  that  the  Catholics  should  be  emancipated,  and 
his  serene  assurance  that,  despite  the  evil  he  had 
seen  and  exposed,  his  own  lot  and  that  of  his  fel- 
lows was  gradually  growing  better,  were  all  fruits 
of  a  faith  that  was  essentially  religious.  The  com- 
fortable optimism  of  a  robust  mind  and  a  well-nur- 
tured body  fails  to  account  for  it.  There  was  a 
deeper  element  of  spiritual  and  ethical  conviction, 
which  shows  sometimes  through^  the  veil  of  humour- 
ous allusion  wherewith  he  loved  to  conceal  it.  One 
may  find  illustration  of  this  in  his  whimsical  but 
unquestionably  sincere  advocacy  of  temperance,  — 
for  considerable  periods  of  his  life  he  was  a  pretty 
consistent  water-drinker,  —  and  in  the  frank  thank- 
fulness with  which  he  recognized  the  deepening 
seriousness  of  the  clergy  among  whom  his  later 
days  were  spent.  "  Whenever  you  meet  a  clergy- 
man of  my  age,"  he  told  Mr.  Gladstone  in  1835, 
"you  may  be  quite  sure  he  is  a  bad  clergyman." ^ 

The  religious  element  that  was  most  notably  in- 
comprehensible and  even  antipathetic  to  the  Edin- 
burgh Reviewers  was  the  mystical.  They  had  some 
understanding  of  the  worth  of  doing  justice ;  some 
inkling  at  least  of  a  love  of  mercy;  but  the  walk- 
ing humbly  with  God,  at  least  as  multitudes  of 
devout  souls  understood  the  act  of  personal  com- 
munion with  an  ever-present  Deity,  was  beside 
their  experience.  Hence  it  came  to  pass  that  in  the 

^  Gladstone's  Gleanings,  vol.  vii,  p.  220  ;  quoted  by  Bassell,  in 
Sydney  Smith,  p.  163. 


144  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

realm  of  literature  Jeffrey  proved  blind  to  the 
deeper  significance  of  Wordsworth;  while  in  that 
of  religion  more  narrowly  considered,  Sydney  Smith 
could  not  understand  his  Methodist  and  Evangeli- 
cal neighbours,  and,  stranger  still,  failed  to  respond 
to  the  heroic  adventure  of  the  early  foreign  mis- 
sionaries— an  adventure  which  will  finally  be  recog- 
nized as  conferring  upon  his  century  one  of  its  chief 
marks  of  distinction.  There  was  ground  enough  for 
a  little  good-natured  raillery  at  the  worthy  souls 
who  inaugurated  a  special  packet  service  between 
London  and  Margate,  and  ordained  that  upon  their 
hoy  there  should  be  nothing  but  serious  conversa- 
tion,— readers  of  Leigh  Hunt's  Autobiography 
will  remember  his  youthful  adventure  upon  the 
craft ;  but  William  Carey  should  have  been  spared. 
No  doubt  his  journal,  taken  by  itself,  may  contain 
passages  calculated  to  raise  a  smile,  so  naively  and 
intimately  does  he  use  terms  of  sacred  and  tre- 
mendous import.  The  fact  is,  however,  that  the 
journal  never  can  be  taken  by  itself.  At  a  cen- 
tury's distance  we  behold  in  it  the  narrative  of  an 
apostle  not  unworthy  to  rank  with  the  first  great 
Twelve.  The  secret  of  this  blindness  in  one  direc- 
tion, which  contrasts  so  vividly  with  exceptional 
clearness  and  breadth  of  view  in  others,  has  been 
discerned  and  set  forth  so  admirably  by  Mr.  Bage- 
hot,  that  once  more  I  must  have  recourse  to  his 
words.  In  speaking  of  the  Whig  aversion  to  mys- 
ticism he  says :  — 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      145 

"A  clear,  precise,  discriminating  intellect  shrinks 
at  once  from  the  symbolic,  the  unbounded,  the  in- 
definite. The  misfortune  is  that  mysticism  is  true. 
There  certainly  are  kinds  of  truth,  borne  in  as  it 
were  instinctively  on  the  human  intellect,  most  in- 
fluential on  the  character  and  the  heart,  yet  hardly 
capable  of  stringent  statement,  difficult  to  limit  by 
an  elaborate  definition." 

Thus  we  have  the  phenomenon  of  Jeffrey's 
criticism  of  Wordsworth,  which  Bagehot  interprets 
in  its  representative  and  universal  significance. 

"Nature  ingeniously  prepared  a  shrill,  artificial 
voice,  which  spoke  in  season  and  out  of  season, 
enough  and  more  than  enough,  what  will  ever  be 
the  idea  of  the  cities  of  the  plain  concerning  those 
who  live  alone  among  the  mountains;  of  the  frivo- 
lous concerning  the  grave,  ...  of  the  common 
concerning  the  uncommon;  the  notion  of  the 
world  of  those  whom  it  will  not  reckon  among  the 
righteous, — it  said, '  This  won't  do.'  And  so  in  all 
time  will  the  lovers  of  polished  Liberalism  speak 
concerning  the  intense  and  lonely  prophet."  ^ 

Among  the  "  Quarterly  "  group  there  was  rather 
more  room  for  such  things  of  the  spirit  as  were 
content  to  find  expression  in  conventional  forms. 
Religion  was  a  part  of  the  Tory  stock  in  trade.  It 
was  forced  to  live  in  the  uncongenial  company  of 
great  narrowness  and  bigotry  on  the  one  hand;  but 
on  the  other  it  proved  true  to  its  nature  by  occasion- 
ally rearing,  even  in  such  thorny  soil,  flowers  and 

*  Literary  Studies^  "  The  First  Edinburgh  Reviewers,"  p.  174. 


146  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

fruits  of  rarest  beauty.  Of  men  like  Gifford,  even 
at  this  stretch  of  time,  when  the  bitterness  of  pre- 
judice has  been  assuaged,  not  much  can  be  made. 
His  was  a  narrow  nature,  and  he  stands  out  as 
almost  the  only  literary  adversary  to  whom  Leigh 
Hunt  in  his  charitable  old  age  could  not  pay  some 
kindly  tribute.  Concerning  the  greatness  and  whole- 
someness  of  Walter  Scott's  faith  in  God  and  man  I 
shall  have  to  speak  in  a  later  chapter ;  as  well  as 
of  the  company  of  High  Church  enthusiasts,  true 
sons  of  the  Romantic  movement,  who  stirred  all 
England  by  their  zeal,  the  purity  and  devotion  of 
their  lives,  their  consummate  literary  gifts,  the 
cogency  of  their  logic — and  the  woful  inadequacy 
of  their  theological  and  ecclesiastical  premisses. 

Of  Southey,  however,  more  needs  to  be  said.  He 
played  a  larger  part  in  the  literary  history  of  the 
period  now  under  review  than  it  is  quite  easy  to 
realize  to-day.  It  would  doubtless  have  surprised  and 
pained  him  could  he  have  seen  his  present  undistin- 
guished place  in  the  firmament  of  literature ;  for, 
though  free  from  silly  vanity,  he  thought  of  him- 
self as  a  star  of  very  nearly  the  first  magnitude,  and 
spoke  repeatedly  of  his  assurance  of  an  immortality 
of  fame.  He  was  not  altogether  wrong  in  this  latter 
conclusion,  although  he  mistakenly  based  it  upon 
his  poetry,  much  of  which  is  but  rhythmical  prose 
and  is  already  forgotten,  instead  of  upon  his  essays, 
biographies,  and  letters,  which  are  still  worth  read- 
ing and  occasionally  read,  and  upon  his  brave,  gra- 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      147 

cious,  and  extraordinarily  toilsome  life,  the  memory 
of  which  is  to-day  as  fragrant  as  ever.  I  am  aware 
that  it  signifies  little  in  criticism  to  say  that  a  poet 
was  a  good  man, —  the  character  of  the  late  Mr. 
Tapper  was  doubtless  as  unimpeachable  as  that  of 
his  "  Proverbial  Philosophy," — but  in  Southey's  case 
the  character  of  the  man,  his  patience,  unselfishness, 
and  devotion,  his  rare  sense  of  honour  and  consistent 
reverence,  his  unobtrusive  yet  quietly  masterful 
piety,  are  of  the  essence  of  his  work  in  letters.  They 
must  be  taken  into  account  in  summing  up  the  in- 
fluence of  the  essayists  and  reviewers  of  his  day ; 
and  they  go  far  toward  justifying  and  in  some  re- 
spects redeeming  the  influence  of  the  "  Quarterly." 
Southey  had  the  gift,  much  needed  in  his  camp,  of 
perceiving  and  appreciating  the  better  side  of  men. 
He  could  not  have  sympathized  with  the  relations 
of  Nelson  and  Lady  Hamilton ;  but  he  could  see 
that  the  famous  signal  flown  from  the  Victory  on 
the  morning  of  Trafalgar  was  a  truer  commentary 
upon  the  essence  of  Nelson's  manhood  than  the  cry 
of  "  Poor  Lady  Hamilton ! "  which  so  closely  prefaced 
his  last  words.  "  Consecrated  cobblers,"  especially 
among  Dissenters,  were  probably  almost  as  far  be- 
yond his  comprehension  as  they  were  beyond  that 
of  Sydney  Smith ;  and  as  Churchman  and  Tory  he 
was  by  no  means  an  ideal  biographer  for  John 
Wesley.  But  none  the  less  the  essential  greatness 
of  Wesley,  his  embodiment  of  faith,  hope,  and 
charity,  together  with  the  enormous  industry  which 


148  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

he  brought  to  their  translation  into  terms  of  com- 
mon goodness,  were  too  close  akin  to  all  that 
Southey  reverenced,  to  escape  recognition  and  hon- 
our. Religion  was  recognized  in  all  he  thought  and 
wrote  as  a  great  and  vital  concern  of  life ;  and  with 
characteristic  boldness  of  design  he  at  one  time  laid 
a  plan  to  make  every  great  mythology  the  basis  of 
a  narrative  poem.  Conservative  though  he  became 
in  his  reaction  from  the  French  Revolution,  he 
never  lost  faith  in  his  fellows  or  degenerated  into 
practical  skepticism  of  the  Eldon  type,  but  kept  to 
the  end  his  love  of  liberty  and  his  sympathy  with 
all  good  men.  Now  and  then,  as  in  "  Goody  Blake 
and  Harry  Gill,"  or  the  "  Battle  of  Blenheim,"  and 
even  more  notably  in  his  wife's^  "Tales  of  the 
Factories,"  and  "  The  Pauper's  Deathbed,"  is  heard 
a  clear  premonition  of  the  '  Social  Question '  which 
was  destined  to  exert  so  powerful  an  influence  upon 
the  religious  and  literary  history  of  the  later  half  of 
the  century. 

Reference  has  already  been  made  to  the  "  Chaldee 
Manuscript"  with  which  "Blackwood's"  made  its 
second  and  effectual  appeal  to  the  notice  of  the  read- 
ing public.  Whenever  the  secondary  and  inciden- 
tal influences  of  religion  upon  literature  come  to  be 
reckoned  up,  this  clever  bit  of  irreverence  must  needs 
be  remembered.  It  was  a  keen  and  impertinent  char- 
acterization of  some  of  the  best-known  men  in  the 

*  His  second  wife,  Catherine  Bowles,  whom  Southey  married  late 
in  life,  but  with  whom  he  had  long  been  in  affectionate  sympathy. 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      149 

literary  circles  of  Edinburgh.  The  genius  which  Wil- 
son and  Lockhart  unquestionably  possessed  for  the 
new  journalism  would,  under  any  circumstances, 
have  conferred  a  sort  of  dubious  distinction  upon  the 
article.  Their  daring  choice  of  the  framework  and 
style  of  the  Book  of  Kevelation  gave  it  notoriety. 
Both  of  these  writers,  as  well  as  Blackwood  himself, 
who  retained  for  some  time  the  practical  editorial 
management  of  the  new  monthly,  were  men  whose 
irreverence  was  incidental  rather  than  essential,  and 
the  experiment  was  not  spoiled  by  repetition.  Wil- 
son's name  is  the  one  most  intimately  associated 
with  the  early  days  of  the  magazine,  and  his  robust, 
full-voiced  style  gave  it  a  characteristic  tone.  It 
would  be  an  artificial  and  perhaps  less  than  candid 
task  to  attempt  to  trace  any  especial  religious  influ- 
ence which  "Blackwood's"  may  have  exerted;  but 
it  is  true  that  Wilson  and  his  compeers  did  some- 
thing —  it  is  probable  that  they  did  a  good  deal  — 
toward  making  possible  a  freer  treatment  of  religious 
topics  in  the  essay  form.  The  most  casual  glance  at 
the  contents  of  our  more  thoughtful  contemporary 
reviews  will  show  how  large  a  place  and  how  free 
a  treatment  is  given  to  religious  and  ethical  ques- 
tions. Equal  rights  are  accorded  to  believer  and  to 
skeptic,  though  with  a  sHghtly  warmer  welcome, 
perhaps,  for  the  beHever  in  one  magazine  and  for 
the  skeptic  in  another.  There  is  no  denying  the  wide 
influence  of  such  discussions  as  that  between  Mr. 
Huxley  and  Mr.  Lilly  in  the  eighties  ;  and  the  way 


150  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

toward  this  "  fair  field  and  no  favour  "  seems  to  have 
been  blazed  by  the  "  Blackwood's  "  group,  though 
they  themselves  did  not  reach  it,  and,  had  they  done 
so,  would  perhaps  have  been  at  some  loss  how  to 
comport  themselves  there. 

Midway  between  this  Edinburgh  set  and  those 
who  were  at  first  contemptuously  called  the  "  Cock- 
neys "  stands  De  Quincey  ;  but  it  suits  my  pre- 
sent purpose  to  group  him  with  Lamb,  Hunt,  and 
Hazlitt.  They  form  a  very  notable  quartette ;  for 
Hazlitt's  place  is  preeminent  among  English  critics ; 
Lamb's  mastery  of  the  essay  was  and  is  unique ; 
Hunt  was  jpar  excellence  the  journalist,  a  lord  of 
the  special  article,  one  who  could  be  interesting  if 
not  authoritative  upon  compulsion  of  the  hour  and 
the  printer's  devil ;  while  De  Quincey  may  fairly  be 
called  the  great  rhetorician  of  the  former  half  of 
his  century. 

Hazlitt  was  of  Unitarian  antecedents  and  marked 
by  the  more  imlovely  Unitarian  characteristics. 
There  can  be  no  question  of  the  debt  under  which 
this  particular  sect  has  laid  the  world  of  thought 
in  general  and  the  world  of  literature  in  particular. 
But  it  has  been  singularly  fruitful  in  spiritual 
Ishmaelites.  Its  '  liberalism,'  instead  of  creating  an 
atmosphere  in  which  the  positive  worth  of  all  hon- 
est belief  is  clear  to  see  and  easy  to  assimilate, 
has  too  often  degenerated  into  a  sort  of  Pharisaic 
distemper  with  all  such  men  and  things  as  will  not 
pronounce  its  particular  shibboleths  of  negation. 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      151 

As  a  clever  and  good-natured  critic  has  recently- 
put  it :  — 

"  It  is  quite  proper  for  one  to  hope  that  he  is 
liberal,  —  we  ought  all  to  hope  it,  —  while  in  our 
more  sanguine  moments  we  might  even  confide 
to  an  intimate  friend  or  two  that  we  believe  we 
were  liberal,  but  none  of  us  have  any  more  right 
to  go  around  publicly  proclaiming  that  we  are  lib- 
eral than  we  have  to  go  around  saying,  '  I  am  a 
gentleman,'  or  ^  I  am  good-looking.'  This  decision 
must  in  the  nature  of  things  rest  wholly  with  our 
neigrhbours."  ^ 

There  was,  however,  in  Hazlitt  a  measure  of 
truly  discerning  liberality.  He  has  put  upon  record 
his  fascination  by  Coleridge  and  the  influence 
which  that  most  fructifying  thinker  exerted  upon 
his  mind.  Whether  he  derived  his  liberality  from 
Coleridge  or  not,  it  reflected  much  that  was  best 
in  Coleridsfe's  attitude  towards  men  and  books  — 
the  attitude  of  the  'understanding  heart.'  In  a 
day  when  criticism,  having  revolted  from  the  classic 
norms  of  the  eighteenth  century,  had  faUen  a  prey 
to  individual  whim  and  party  passion  as  represented 
by  the  critical  free  lances  of  the  "  Edinburgh  "and 
"Quarterly"  reviews,  Hazlitt  did  much  to  organize 
a  saner  and  more  generous  method.  He  understood 
the  true  office  of  a  critic  to  be  that  of  interpreta- 
tion, and  he  brought  a  singularly  discerning  mind 
and  trenchant  style  to  its  fulfilment.  So  far  forth 

^  J.  S.  Zelie,  in  an  essay  upon  Our  Denominational  Paradoxes. 


152  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

he  was  generous  in  purpose  and  in  act.  But  there 
remained  a  mordant,  atrabilious  temper  which  led 
him  to  think  and  boast  of  himself  as  a  radical.  As 
has  been  intimated,  the  radical  is  a  very  necessary 
member  of  society.  His  uses  are  manifold  until  he 
becomes  enamoured  of  his  own  radicalism;  when 
his  self-conceit  and  general  viciousness  prove  just 
as  disagreeable  and  dangerous  to  society  as  any 
other  manifestation  of  conceit  and  folly. 

The  contrast  in  this  respect  between  Hazlitt  and 
Leigh  Hunt  is  interesting  and  instructive.  Hunt 
was  a  radical  whose  trumpet  of  heresy  gave  forth 
no  uncertain  sound.  He  held  views  upon  the  ques- 
tions of  marriage  and  the  relation  of  the  sexes  that 
seemed  to  align  him  with  Godwin  and  Shelley.  Yet 
he  proved  himself  to  be  an  affectionate  and  devoted 
husband  and  father ;  not  very  wise  or  efficient,  to 
be  sure,  in  his  headship  of  the  family,  but  free  from 
all  taint  of  conjugal  unfaithfulness.  He  was  more- 
over an  incidental  preacher  of  Universalism.  No 
one  can  read  his  "  Autobiography  "  —  and  all  lovers 
of  literature  ought  to  read  it  —  without  a  half- 
amused  sense  of  his  assurance  upon  the  final  des- 
tiny of  all  the  race.  There  were  to  be  no  exceptions. 
By  hook  or  by  crook,  by  grace  or  by  violence,  Leigh 
Hunt  would  have  all  men  to  be  saved.  He  had  all 
the  weakness  as  well  as  the  strength  of  that  rather 
futile  good-nature  which  rushes  blindly  to  this  con- 
clusion. His  creditors  clamoured  for  their  just  dues, 
the  bailiff  struggled  with  the  wolf  for  a  place  at 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      153 

his  door,  his  household  gods  were  habitually  in 
slovenly  disarray,  —  how  slovenly,  Carlyle  has  told 
us  in  a  passage  as  cruel  as  it  is  unforgettable,  — 
his  boys  were  growing  up  to  be  bad  copies  of  their 
father's  less  lovely  aspect ;  while  with  serene  be- 
nevolence and  unflagging  industry  Leigh  Hunt 
toiled  on  to  old  age,  a  book  or  a  pen  ever  in  his 
hand,  cheerful,  improvident,  loveable  to  the  last. 
No  man  in  the  literary  history  of  his  century  bet- 
ter illustrated  that  grace  which  suffereth  long  and 
is  kind.  He  wielded  a  sharp  pen,  but  never  an 
ill-natured  one.  The  keenest  criticism  to  which  he 
was  subjected,  and  even  the  reputed  caricature  as 
Harold  Skimpole  by  his  friend  Dickens,  could  not 
sour  his  temper  or  long  depress  his  spirits.^  His 
"  Autobiography  "  is  redolent  of  peace  and  good- 
will. He  understood  Shelley ;  he  was  so  loyal  to 
the  memory  of  Keats  as  to  cry  "  Peccavi"  and  burn 
his  faggot  pubHcly,  when  he  discovered  that  Keats 
thought  him  remiss  as  a  champion,  although  his 
offence  seems  to  have  been  a  sin  of  omission  dis- 
cernible by  no  eye  less  keen  than  that  of  the  in- 
valid poet's  own  captiousness ;  and  he  was  charitably 
just  to  the  strange  mixture  of  iron  and  clay  in  the 
figure  of  Byron.  Without  Hazhtt's  power  to  see 
into  the  deepest  things  of  literature,  he  was  vastly 

'  In  view  of  Dickens's  express  disclaimer,  it  would  seem  unjust  to 
charge  him  with  this  lapse  of  a  by  no  means  faultless  taste.  There 
is  a  distinction,  and  a  broad  one,  between  deliberate  caricature  and 
the  ascription  to  an  imaginary  character  of  certain  traits  that  may 
have  been  suggested  by  a  real  one. 


154  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

more  humane  and  gracious  in  his  dealings  with  the 
makers  of  literature  ;  and  it  is  a  matter  of  thanks- 
giving that.a  journalist  of  such  notable  powers  and 
such  radical  convictions  should  have  maintained 
upon  the  whole  an  attitude  of  such  consistent  rev- 
erence toward  all  things  pure,  lovely,  and  of  good 
report. 

This  same  spirit  of  deep  reverence  for  the  essence 
as  contrasted  with  the  temporary  forms  and  phrases 
of  religion  characterized  Hunt's  elder  and  greater 
friend,  Charles  Lamb.  He  is  perhaps  the  best-loved 
figure  in  all  English  letters ;  and  when  we  come  to 
put  the  question  why,  we  are  driven  for  answer  to 
the  dutif ulness,  self-sacrifice,  and  unfailing  affection 
which  graced  the  life,  as  truly  as  to  the  unique 
genius  for  the  intimate  essay  and  epistle  which  made 
the  man  of  letters.  The  daily  walk  and  conversation 
was  in  one  aspect  of  it  unlovely  enough.  There  is 
nothing  especially  winsome  about  the  India  House 
drudgery,  honourable  as  it  was ;  and  there  is  much 
that  is  positively  painful  in  the  growing  thirst  for 
and  dependence  upon  gin  and  brandy.  Let  us  keep 
the  sordid  words ;  they  comport  best  with  the  seamy 
side  of  the  man's  life.  How  seamy  it  sometimes 
looked  may  be  inferred  again,  as  in  Leigh  Hunt's 
case,  from  the  pitiless  revelations  of  Carlyle,  though 
it  must  be  remembered  that  in  such  matters  Carlyle 
had  the  beak  and  claws  of  a  harpy.  Yet,  in  spite 
of  all.  Lamb's  place  remains  secure,  the  "  Letters  " 
not  less  than  the  "  Essays  "  buttressing  it  with  every 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      155 

semblance  and  promise  of  perpetuity.  The  secret 
of  it  has  been  discerned  by  many  but  best  set  forth, 
perhaps,  by  Mr.  Birrell.  Readers  of  his  "  Obiter 
Dicta  " — may  their  tribe  increase  !  — will  remember 
the  essay  upon  "  Truth-hunting,"  and  the  passage 
which  its  author  quotes  from  "  Elia  "  as  illustrating 
the  attitude  which  Mary  Lamb  took  toward  the 
revolutionary  opinions  of  her  brother's  friends. 

"  It  has  been  the  lot  of  my  cousin,  of tener,  per- 
haps, than  I  could  have  wished,  to  have  had  for 
her  associates  and  mine  free-thinkers,  leaders  and 
disciples  of  novel  philosophies  and  systems,  but  she 
neither  wrangles  with  nor  accepts  their  opinions." 

Then  follows  the  memorable  comparison  with 
Coleridge  sitting  upon  Highgate  Hill,  and  asking, 
"  What  is  truth  ?  "  while  Lamb,  abiding  in  his  al- 
ways anxious  and  sometimes  agonized  home,  con- 
tents himself  with  the  humbler  query,  "What  are 
trumps?"  It  is  put  with  wondrous  cleverness, 
though  with  somewhat  scant  justice  —  at  least  one 
hopes  so  —  to  Coleridge.  Be  that  as  it  may,  how- 
ever. Lamb  will  always  remain  an  appeahng  and 
inspiring  figure  to  such  as  realize  the  measure  of 
his  devotion  to  a  father  who  was  half  imbecile  and 
a  sister  who  periodically  became  wholly  insane.  No 
English  writer  has  better  claim  upon  our  attention 
when  he  exhorts  us  "  to  cultivate  the  filial  feelings  " ; 
and  through  all  his  work  there  runs  an  undercur- 
rent of  influence  toward  the  cherishing  of  the  great 


166  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Christian  graces.  He  rarely  preaches;  but  he  is 
always  taking  them  for  granted  as  the  only  reli- 
able props  and  supports  of  life  ;  they  make  it  bear- 
able when  otherwise  its  perplexities  and  burdens 
would  be  too  great  for  us.  Thus  Lamb's  humour  is 
at  once  robbed  of  all  cynical  bitterness  and  takes 
on  a  sort  of  haunting,  wistful  quality,  as  though  he 
saw  at  once  the  incongruity  and  possibility  of  life, 
and  was  inspired  by  a  confidence  that  experience 
here  or  elsewhere  would  somehow  suffice  to  make 
the  ideal  plan  complete. 

De  Quincey  occupies  a  position  midway  between 
the  Edinburgh  and  the  Cockney  groups.  His  "  Con- 
fessions of  an  Opium-Eater  "  appeared  in  the  "  Lon- 
don Magazine  "  ;  but  the  far  larger  portion  of  his 
most  characteristic  and  significant  work  was  pro- 
duced and  published  in  Edinburgh.  Of  the  group 
of  essayists  whom  I  have  individually  characterized, 
he  is  the  only  one  who  set  himself  definitely  to  the 
defence  of  current  Christianity.  He  had  a  certain 
zeal  for  religion  which  led  him  to  wrestle  with 
Hume's  time-worn  and  hoary  argument  against 
miracles,  —  not  very  successfully,  be  it  said,  owing 
to  the  plain  fact  that  Hume's  argument  has  a  cer- 
tain validity  against  a  very  false  but  almost  equally 
prevalent  notion  of  what  a  miracle  may  be.  De 
Quincey  hated  Frenchmen,  too,  which  may  have 
commended  him  to  the  straiter  sects  of  the  godly 
as  a  fit  defender  of  the  faith.  He  lived  and  wrote 
in  the  heyday  of  suspicion  of  France  and  all  her 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      157 

works ;  when  she  had  ceased  to  be  an  armed  antag- 
onist whom  England  was  bound  to  respect,  and  had 
relapsed  into  the  position  of  a  remembered  anxiety 
—  the  cause  of  former  stress  and  sorrow.  The  whole 
system  of  her  religion,  philosophy,  politics,  and 
morals  —  so  far  as  she  was  supposed  to  have  mor- 
als —  was  under  the  ban.  "  Statesmen  saw  its  ab- 
surdity, holy  men  were  shocked  by  its  impiety, 
mercantile  men  felt  its  effects  upon  the  five  per 
cents."  ^  Yet,  in  spite  of  De  Quincey's  adventure  as 
a  defender  of  the  faith,  he  has  perhaps  less  signifi- 
cance for  our  immediate  purpose  than  his  contem- 
poraries. More  than  almost  any  other  man  in  our 
literature,  with  the  possible  exception  of  Sir  Thomas 
Browne,  his  eminence  and  claim  upon  our  memories 
are  due  to  his  mastery  of  rhetoric.  Ruskin  vied  with 
him,  to  be  sure,  but  Ruskin  made  other  claims  upon 
his  readers  than  those  of  a  rhetorician,  and  it  may 
be  questioned  whether  Ruskin  were  in  any  such 
sense  the  master  —  as  distinguished  from  the  ser- 
vant —  of  the  art  of  expression  as  De  Quincey .  Of 
course  the  latter  is  at  times  merely  flamboyant ;  but 
when  he  is  at  his  best  there  is  a  power  in  his  gor- 
geous phrasing  which  the  veriest  ascetic  in  literary 
taste  and  habit  must  acknowledge.  Indeed,  for  my- 
self, I  am  quite  capable  of  a  severely  critical  atti- 

*  I  trust  that  the  slight  anachronism  involved  in  this  paraphrase 
of  Bagehot's  words — for  the  quotation  is  not  quite  exact  —  may 
be  forgiven  me.  He  was  speaking  of  a  somewhat  earlier  day  ;  but 
the  British  habit  described  is  not  yet  outgrown. 


158  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tude  toward  him  and  all  other  rhetoricians  after  a 
decent  period  of  separation  and  neglect ;  but  if  by 
chance  the  "Confessions*'  open  at  some  of  the 
greater  visions,  or  an  excerpt  from  "  Our  Ladies  of 
Sorrow"  beguile  me  in  turning  the  pages  of  a 
cyclopedia,  his  foot  is  on  my  neck  —  I  am  his  man 
again. 

In  one  or  two  respects,  however,  De  Quincey  ad- 
mirably illustrates  the  indebtedness  of  literature  to 
the  language  and  the  deeper  emotions  of  religion. 
As  in  the  case  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne  and  Ruskin, 
he  has  constant  recourse  to  the  Bible  for  the  fram- 
ing of  his  most  splendid  periods.  Take  for  instance 
the  well-known  passage  from  the  "Philosophy  of 
Roman  History,"  commenting  upon  Gibbon's  de- 
scription of  the  scope  of  a  Caesar's  sway;  from 
which  he  turns  to  the  lot  of  the  later  emperors 
themselves. 

"  The  imagination  of  man  can  frame  nothing  so 
awful  —  the  experience  of  man  has  witnessed  no- 
thing so  awful  —  as  the  situation  and  tenure  of  the 
Western  Caesar.  The  danger  which  threatened  him 
was  like  the  pestilence  which  walketh  in  darkness, 
but  which  also  walketh  in  noon-day.  Morning  and 
evening,  summer  and  winter,  brought  no  change 
or  shadow  of  turning  to  this  particular  evil.  In 
that  respect  it  enjoyed  the  immunities  of  God  —  it 
was  the  same  yesterday,  to-day,  and  for  ever.  After 
three  centuries  it  had  lost  nothing  of  its  virulence  ; 
it  was  growing  worse  continually  :  the  heart  of  man 
ached  under  the  evil  and  the  necessity  of  the  evil. 


THE  EDINBURGH  AND  THE  QUARTERLY      159 

Can  any  man  measure  the  sickening  fear  which 
must  have  possessed  the  hearts  of  the  ladies  and 
the  children  composing  the  imperial  family?  To 
them  the  mere  terror,  entailed  like  an  inheritance 
of  leprosy  upon  their  family  above  all  others,  must 
have  made  it  a  woe  like  one  of  the  evils  of  the 
Revelation,  —  such  in  its  infliction,  such  in  its  in- 
evitability." ' 

Or  turn  to  the  "  Suspiria  de  Prof  undis,"  and  re- 
read the  passage  describing  Our  Ladies  of  Sorrow. 
It  is  too  long  for  quotation,  though  its  earlier  sec- 
tions, dealing  with  Madonna,  Our  Lady  of  Tears, 
and  Our  Lady  of  Sighs  would  reenforce  the  effect 
of  the  quotation  just  made,  so  alive  are  they  with 
the  language  and  imagery  of  Scripture.  The  clos- 
ing paragraph,  however,  deals  with  a  yet  more  ur- 
gent application  of  religious  impulse  to  the  power 
and  purpose  of  letters. 

"But  the  third  sister,  who  is  also  the  young- 
est — !  Hush  !  whisper  whilst  we  talk  of  her  !  Her 
Kingdom  is  not  large  or  else  no  flesh  should  live; 
but  within  that  kingdom  all  power  is  hers.  Her 
head,  turreted  like  that  of  Cybele,  rises  almost  be- 
yond the  reach  of  sight.  She  droops  not;  and  her 
eyes,  rising  so  high,  might  be  hidden  by  distance. 
But,  being  what  they  are,  they  cannot  be  hidden ; 
through  the  treble  veil  of  crape  which  she  wears, 
the  fierce  light  of  a  blazing  misery,  that  rests  not 
for  matins  or  for  vespers,  for  noon  of  day  or  noon 
of  night,  for  ebbing  or  for  flowing  tide,  may  be 

»  De  Quincey's  Works,  Riverside  Edition,  vol.  vii,  p.  333. 


160  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

read  from  the  very  ground.  She  is  the  defier  of 
God.  She  also  is  the  mother  of  lunacies,  and  the 
suggestress  of  suicides.  Deep  lie  the  roots  of  her 
power;  but  narrow  is  the  nation  that  she  rules. 
For  she  can  approach  only  those  in  whom  a  pro- 
found nature  has  been  upheaved  by  central  convul- 
sions; in  whom  the  heart  trembles  and  the  brain 
rocks  under  conspiracies  of  tempest  from  without 
and  tempest  from  within.  Madonna  moves  with  un- 
certain steps,  fast  or  slow,  but  still  with  tragic 
grace.  Our  Lady  of  Sighs  creeps  timidly  and 
stealthily.  But  this  youngest  sister  moves  with  in- 
calculable motions,  bounding,  and  with  a  tiger's 
leaps.  She  carries  no  key ;  for  though  coming  rarely 
amongst  men,  she  storms  all  doors  at  which  she  is 
permitted  to  enter  at  all.  And  her  name  is  Mater 
Tenebrarum — Our  Lady  of  Darkness."* 

We  shall  have  occasion  to  recur  to  this  weird 
Spirit  of  Unbelief  in  commenting  upon  some  of  the 
most  characteristic  utterances  of  the  latter  half  of 
the  century.  De  Quincey  limned  her  features  with 
strange  foresight,  as  though  in  the  light  of  her  eyes 
he  had  caught  a  prophetic  glimpse  of  Thomson's 
"City  of  Dreadful  Night,"  Tennyson's  "Despair," 
and  John  Davidson's  "  Ballad  in  Blank  Verse,"  — 
each  in  its  way  the  epic  of  such  as  find  themselves 
without  hope  and  without  God  in  the  world.  He 
witnesses  anew  to  the  interdependence  of  literature 
and  religion,  and  the  fact  that  for  the  purposes  of 
the  former  "  Gods  are  needed,  if  only  to  be  defied." 

»  De  Quincey's  Works^  Riverside  Edition,  vol.  i,  pp.  244-245. 


CHAPTER  VI 

CLAPHAM   AND    OXFORD 

"You  seem  a  very  temperate  people  here,"  said 
Mr.  Birrell  to  a  Cornisliman,  when  on  a  walking 
tour  in  that  delectable  duchy ;  "  how  did  it  happen  ?" 
The  miner  raised  his  hat  reverently  as  he  made 
answer,  "  There  came  a  man  amongst  us  once,  and 
his  name  was  John  Wesley."  ^  The  smoke  of  secta- 
rian battle  is  still  too  thick  for  men  to  see  quite 
clearly  how  much  that  is  most  substantial,  whole- 
some, and  therefore  permanently  influential  in  her 
life,  England  owes  to  the  Wesleys  and  the  revival 
of  religion  which  they  did  so  much  to  promote. 
The  profit  of  their  work  is  somewhat  more  freely 
acknowledged  in  America  than  in  England,  though 
even  there  Methodism  is  too  often  known  by  its 
accidents  rather  than  its  essence.  Mr.  Kipling's 
verses  upon  a  great  national  celebration  are  of  no 
less  telling  application  to  periods  of  religious 
awakening :  — 

The  tumult  and  the  shouting  dies  — 
The  captains  and  the  kings  depart ; 
Still  stands  Thine  ancient  sacrifice, 
An  humble  and  a  contrite  heart. 

*  Res  Judicatce,  "  Cardinal  Newman." 


162  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

It  is  a  little  difficult  for  the  plain  man  to  see  why 
tumult  and  shouting  should  be  counted  so  essential 
to  political  and  patriotic  rejoicing  that  their  absence 
throws  doubt  upon  its  sincerity,  while  at  the  same 
time  their  presence  in  the  case  of  widespread  and 
deeply  stirred  religious  feeling  is  reckoned  equally 
suspicious.  In  point  of  fact  they  represent  but  the 
expression  of  a  passing  mood  in  either  case  —  a 
mood  which  moreover  is  often  the  creature  of  some- 
thing close  akin  to  the  mob-spirit,  and  marked  by 
its  epidemic  character  and  liability  to  quick  revul- 
sion. The  fire  and  the  earthquake  having  passed, 
the  attentiveness  with  which  the  still,  small  voice 
of  genuine  revelation  is  heard  and  heeded  deter- 
mines the  value  of  the  whole  experience.  That  is 
measured  in  terms  of  humility,  contrition,  and  ser- 
vice. 

In  attempting  to  reckon  up  the  account  in  the 
case  of  Wesley,  the  Anglican  is  still  prone  to  be 
supercilious  and  the  Methodist  bumptious.  The 
mismanagement  of  the  whole  matter  by  those  in 
ecclesiastical  authority  in  Wesley's  day  was  as  ex- 
pensive to  the  Church  of  England  as  the  Revocation 
of  the  Edict  of  Nantes  proved  to  France.  Both  re- 
sulted in  the  practical  banishment,  in  one  case  from 
the  Church  and  in  the  other  from  the  nation,  of 
great  numbers  in  whom  the  hope  of  the  future 
dwelt.  Institutions,  hke  trees,  receive  their  most 
substantial  sustenance  from  beneath ;  they  cannot 
afford  to  ignore  or  oppose  these  agitations  in  the 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  163 

earth  about  their  roots,  which,  while  they  often 
disturb  the  accustomed  order  and  form  of  mere  cir- 
cumstance, and  sometimes  threaten  the  rootlets  of 
the  upper  soil,  always  give  more  than  they  take  by 
bringing  air,  light,  and  moisture  to  the  roots  them- 
selves. 

There  is  of  course  a  sense  in  which  the  Church 
of  England  is  the  mother  of  Methodism.  The  Wes- 
leys  belonged  to  her  by  birth,  training,  conviction, 
and  affection.  They  were  loath  to  quit  her  ministry : 
but  they  had  their  vocation ;  the  day's  work  must 
needs  be  done ;  and  when  church  doors  were  closed 
they  had  necessary  recourse  to  fields  and  commons. 
That  which  is  barred  from  the  door,  however,  some- 
times makes  its  entrance  through  the  window,  and 
Methodism  did  its  work  upon  the  Church.  The  zeal 
of  Anglican  writers  to  prove  that  the  Evangelical 
movement  was  not  of  Methodist  or  Wesleyan  origin 
is  a  little  hard  to  understand.  The  Wesley s  and 
Whitefield  were  men  of  whose  work  any  church 
and  any  university  might  well  be  covetous ;  but  for 
my  present  purpose  I  am  content  to  allow  the  dis- 
claimer. The  fact  seems  to  be  that  the  Wesleyan 
influence  upon  life  and  thought  in  the  Anglican 
communion  was  similar  to  that  which  an  electrical 
current  induces  in  an  adjacent  coil.  The  induced 
current  is  not  an  integral  part  of  the  original  move- 
ment ;  but  none  the  less  the  latter  is  accountable 
for  it.  So,  while  the  Evangelicals  may  not  look  to 
the  great  Itinerants  as  to  their  spiritual  fathers, 


164  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

still,  the  new  life  which  began  to  appear  in  the 
establishment  toward  the  close  of  the  eighteenth 
century  was  a  phase  of  the  same  awakening.  In  so 
far  as  this  awakening  was  theological,  the  Evan- 
gelicals within  the  English  Church  generally  sided 
with  the  Calvinism  of  Whitefield  and  Toplady  as 
opposed  to  the  Arminianism  of  the  Wesleys.  So 
far  forth  the  Evangelicals  may  be  said  to  have  car- 
ried on  the  great  Puritan  tradition ;  so  far  forth, 
too,  they  may  seem  to  represent  the  sterner  and 
less  lovely  aspects  of  the  revival. 

Certain  reservations  must,  however,  be  made  at 
this  point.  With  singular  unanimity  it  seems  to 
have  been  admitted  that  the  Puritans  were  not  only 
deficient  in  a  sense  of  humour,  but  lacked  it  alto- 
gether. Deficient  they  may  have  been  in  some  de- 
gree ;  though  I  incline  to  believe  the  deficiency  to 
have  been  apparent  rather  than  real.  That  they  were 
without  the  sense  of  humour  altogether  is  not  for  a 
moment  to  be  admitted  by  any  one  who  looks  beneath 
the  surface  of  their  life  or  studies  the  characteristics 
of  their  descendants.  It  is  entirely  true  that  the 
Puritans  of  the  seventeenth  century  and  the  Evan- 
gelicals of  the  nineteenth  lived  in  a  world  of  tre- 
mendous realities  upon  which  their  thoughts  were 
trained  to  dwell,  and  about  which  they  spoke  and 
wrote.  All  their  public  utterances  were  pitched  to 
this  key.  Life  was  too  great  a  business  to  afford 
much  scope  for  levity.  The  eye  of  the  Great  Task- 
master, the  Atonement   through  which   appeared 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  165 

the  conflict  of  God's  love  and  justice,  the  profound 
moral  issues  of  daily  life,  and  the  sure  expectation 
of  a  final  Assize  whereat  these  issues  were  to  be  for- 
ever determined  to  each  soul,  —  these  were  among 
the  realities  of  Puritan  life.  No  wonder  that,  being 
what  they  were,  they  became  its  transcendent  reali- 
ties. No  wonder,  either,  that  the  solemnity  which 
necessarily  attached  to  their  contemplation  gave  a 
generally  sober  and  occasionally  sombre  hue  to  the 
life  and  words  of  these  men  as  the  world  saw  them. 
This  attention  to  the  detail  of  walk  and  conversa- 
tion was  doubtless  over-scrupulous  sometimes,  and 
it  afforded  a  cover  for  incidental  hypocrisy.  The 
misfortune  is  that  the  occasional  formalist  and  yet 
more  occasional  hypocrite  should  have  been  accepted 
by  too  many  careless  writers  as  typical.  In  point  of 
fact  the  self-control  which  was  the  Puritan's  habit 
gave  him  a  generally  clear  eye ;  the  contemplation 
of  high  themes  helped  him  toward  vigour  of  mind ; 
and  the  belief  in  great  mysteries  stirred  his  imagi- 
nation. From  such  a  man  life  could  not  hide  her 
little  incono^ruities  and  her  amusing:  contrasts.  To 
be  sure,  there  were  great  incongruities,  too,  and 
contrasts  that  were  terrible.  These  overshadowing 
matters  must  needs  have  due  reverence  paid  them; 
but  in  the  shadows  there  were  rifts  of  sunlight 
where  children  might  play  and  friends  laugh  to- 
gether. 

Colonel  Hutchinson,  for  instance,  was  a  Puritan, 
but  no  morose  stifler  of  mirth.  An  ancestor  of  the 


166  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

present  writer  came  to  New  England  in  1635,  a 
soldier  of  nineteen.  His  companion-in-arms  and 
lifelong  friend  was  a  young  engineer  officer  who 
had  served  his  apprenticeship  in  the  Low  Countries. 
Together  they  were  shut  up  in  a  little  seaboard  fort 
and  close  beleaguered  by  the  savages.  Both  were 
godly  men  after  the  Puritan  fashion.  Both  lived  to 
old  age,  and  in  later  years,  when  settled  upon  their 
separate  grants  of  land,  occasionally  corresponded. 
Fragments  of  this  correspondence  still  survive ;  and 
it  is  interesting  to  notice  that  after  a  score  or  two 
of  years  one  of  the  things  of  which  they  remind 
each  other  is  the  heartiness  of  their  old-time  laugh- 
ter in  the  very  mid- winter  of  distress,  when  "  Captain 
Hunger"  had  already  effected  an  entrance  into 
their  entrenchments  and  the  savages  were  hard  upon 
his  heels.  Nor  can  any  one  familiarize  himself  with 
the  traditions  of  Puritan  communities  without  ob- 
taining abundant  evidence  of  the  clear  vision,  the 
alert  imagination,  and  the  gift  of  succinct  and 
shrewd  expression  which  characterized  their  peo- 
ple. In  the  older  New  England  villages  it  is  no  un- 
common thing  to  find  sayings  of  certain  families 
handed  down  from  generation  to  generation,^  which 
testify  by  their  keenness  of  observation,  their  whim- 

^  One  of  these  sayings  of  a  good-naturedly  cynical  old  maid  re- 
lates to  the  venders  of  kitchenware  with  whom  she  sometimes  dealt 
and  against  whom  she  as  often  took  up  her  parable.  "  She  had  never 
bought  anything  of  a  tin-peddler,"  she  was  wont  to  declare,  "  that 
failed  to  leak,  but  once  —  and  that  was  a  strainer."  A  small  joke 
to  be  sure,  but  significant  of  a  humourous  habit. 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  167 

sical  exaggeration,  and  their  gently  sub-acid  qual- 
ity, to  the  abounding  humour  of  the  elder  days. 

A  similar  caveat  needs  to  be  entered  against  the 
general  ascription  of  gloom  and  inhumanity  to  the 
Evangelical  character  as  it  appeared  in  England 
during  the  first  three  decades  of  last  century.  The 
Evangelicals  were,  to  be  sure,  serious  people  ;  but 
a  modicum  of  seriousness  whets  the  appetite  for 
many  of  life's  most  wholesome  pleasures,  precisely 
as  temperance  and  a  taste  for  plain  food  garnish 
the  dinner-table  with  a  zest  which  the  epicure  may 
seek  in  vain.  It  is  true  that  the  forms  of  this  seri- 
ousness were  easy  to  imitate  ;  and  that  a  good  deal 
of  Philistinism  as  well  as  some  downright  hypocrisy 
was  enrolled  under  the  Evangelical  banner  ;  but  it 
is  none  the  less  a  pity  that  the  literary  treatment 
of  the  Evangehcals  should  so  often  have  been  by 
way  of  caricature.  The  professional  'literary  per- 
son' seems  especially  prone  to  illiberality  in  matters 
of  religion.  Desirous  of  cultivating  lightness  of 
touch,  and  very  conscious  of  the  general  appetite 
for  ridicule,  the  hypocrite  and  the  religious  poseur 
play  no  small  part  upon  his  page.  So  enamoured  of 
them  does  he  sometimes  become  as  to  forget  that 
men  do  not  counterfeit  bad  money.  The  hypocrite 
and  formalist  of  fiction  is  often  but  the  distorted 
reflection  in  an  imperfect  mirror  of  some  honour- 
able and  constructive  life. 

This  digression  is  due  to  the  fact  that  the  Evan- 
gelicals seem  to  the  present  writer  to  have  been 


168  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

seriously  wounded  in  the  house  of  their  friends. 
Their  contribution,  either  direct  or  indirect,  to  Eng- 
glish  literature  is  very  considerable,  and  they  de- 
serve better  treatment  at  its  hands.  It  has  been 
contended  by  one  eminently  competent  to  maintain 
his  point,  that  a  chief  distinction  between  Newman 
and  Wesley  was  the  lack  of  charm  in  the  case  of 
the  latter  as  contrasted  with  the  confessed  fascina- 
tion of  the  former.^  The  contention  may  be  admit- 
ted ;  but  we  must  beware  about  wholesale  admissions 
of  the  sort  when  we  come  to  an  estimate  of  the  later 
Evangelicals.  The  group  about  Clapham  Common, 
which  Sydney  Smith  nicknamed  the  "  Clapham 
Sect,"  is  a  case  in  point.  I  shall  use  the  term  broadly, 
as  representative  rather  than  definitive,  since  it 
may  fairly  include  men  like  Simeon  and  Milner  of 
Cambridge  and  possibly  even  a  Unitarian,  like 
Clarkson  of  anti-slavery  fame. 

When  a  man  is  accused  of  diametrically  opposite 
vices,  there  is  considerable  ground  for  hope  that  his 
life  may  have  been  guided  by  sweet  reasonableness. 
The  Evangelicals  of  the  Clapham  type  have  been 
thus  accused  of  a  severity  and  sternness  which 
seemed  to  put  the  goal  of  true  religion  at  the  end 
of  a  long  and  forbidding  vista  of  asceticism  ;  they 
have  also  been  regarded  as  adepts  in  the  gentle  art 
of  reconciling  a  stern  and  rugged  creed  with  a  very 
considerable  indulgence  in  the  good  things  of  this 
world.  The  villas  about  Clapham  Common  were  un- 

*  Res  Judicatce,  ^  Cardinal  Newman." 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  169 

questionably  the  scenes  of  many  serious  conferences, 
much  debate  upon  high  and  awful  themes,  and  oc- 
casional prayer  meetings.  They  also  had  their  mod- 
est interludes  of  cakes  and  ale.  Yet  few  of  those 
who  have  undertaken  to  portray  them  seem  able  to 
see  more  than  one  side  of  the  whole  experience  — 
with  the  single  great  exception  of  Sir  James  Stephen. 
I  have  elsewhere  ventured  upon  an  estimate  of 
the  high  place  in  English  letters  belonging  to  the 
"  Essays  in  Ecclesiastical  Biography."^  Those  who 
would  make  a  friend  of  one  so  eminently  friendly  as 
Sir  James  Stephen  always  shewed  himself  when  he 
took  up  the  reviewer's  pen  must  seek  him  there ; 
and  those  who  would  learn  what  manner  of  men  the 
leading  Evangelicals  of  the  early  century  were,  and 
gain  some  inkling  of  their  influence  upon  English 
life  and  letters,  will  give  especial  heed  to  the  three 
essays  upon  "  The  Evangelical  Succession,"  "  Wil- 
liam Wilberforce,"  and  "  The  Clapham  Sect." 

*  See  The  Dynamic  of  Christianity^  p.  186.  Since  that  page  was 
written  ray  attention  has  been  called  to  Sir  Leslie  Stephen's  refer- 
ence to  these  essays  in  the  Life  of  his  brother,  Sir  James  FitzJames 
Stephen. 

"  I  will  not,"  he  says,  "  express  any  critical  judgement  of  their 
qualities  ;  but  this  I  will  say  :  putting  aside  Macaulay's  Essays, 
which  possess  merits  of  an  entirely  different  order,  I  do  not  think 
that  any  of  the  collected  essays  re-published  from  the  Edinburgh 
Review  indicate  a  natural  gift  for  style  equal  to  my  father^s.  Judg- 
ing from  these,  which  are  merely  the  overflowing  of  a  mind  em- 
ployed upon  other  most  absorbing  duties,  I  think  that  my  father, 
had  he  devoted  his  talents  to  literature,  would  have  gained  a  far 
higher  place  than  has  been  reached  by  any  of  his  family."  —  Life  of 
Sir  James  FitzJames  Stephen^  p.  55. 


170  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Coteries  are  by  their  nature  self-centred  ;  and 
there  can  be  little  question  that,  in  form  at  least, 
the  frequenters  of  Henry  Thornton's  oval  drawing- 
room  by  Clapham  Common  —  a  room  designed  by 
William  Pitt  —  deserved  the  name  and  reputation 
of  a  sect.  But  they  were  saved  from  the  sectarian 
fate  of  meagreness  of  soul  by  the  character  and  the 
ambitions  of  the  sectaries.  It  is  difficult  for  the 
writer  of  to-day  to  attempt  a  characterization  of 
these  men  without  having  recourse  to  Sir  James 
Stephen's  words,  so  graphic  are  they  and  grouped 
in  such  sonorous  periods. 

John  Thornton,  a  rich  and  benevolent  London 
merchant,  is  known  to  all  lovers  of  Cowper  as  a 
consistent  friend  of  the  poet,  and  one  who  dis- 
tributed considerable  sums  in  charity  through  his 
hands  and  those  of  his  neighbour,  John  Newton. 
Thornton's  son,  Henry,  inherited  his  benevolence, 
his  wealth,  and  his  attachment  to  Evangelical  princi- 
ples. He  entered  Parliament  and  represented  there 
not  only  his  immediate  constituents,  but  that  best 
type  of  independent  legislator  who  takes  conscience 
as  well  as  party  into  account  and  insists  that  con- 
science shall  speak  the  determining  word.  However 
easily  his  Hps  may  have  framed  the  Evangelical 
watchwords,  his  life  forbade  any  candid  critic  from 
denying  that  they  were  rich  in  content.  Memoranda 
discovered  after  his  death  shewed  that  during  his 
earlier  life  not  less  than  six-sevenths  of  his  income 
had  been  given  in  benevolence.   Later  on,  when 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  171 

increasing  family  cares  and  expenses  forced  him  to 
reduce  this  portion  to  one-third,  he  yet  seems  never 
to  have  given  in  charity  less  than  two  thousand 
pounds  a  year.  Twice  at  least  he  made  large  de- 
mands, not  upon  income  only  but  upon  capital  as 
well,  in  order  that  he  might  satisfy  creditors  of 
embarrassed  firms  who  could  have  no  legal  claim 
upon  him,  but  who  might  have  been  influenced,  he 
thought,  to  trust  their  debtors  by  the  countenance 
which  he  or  his  partners  had  given  them.  He  made 
it  a  rule  not  to  increase  his  estate  but  to  distribute 
its  surplus  yearly.  How  wisely  this  was  done,  in  the 
view  of  modern  scientific  charity,  I  do  not  know; 
but  the  consistent  generosity  of  his  heart  and  life 
is  beyond  doubt.  "  As  a  legislator,"  says  Sir  James 
Stephen,  "  he  had  condemned  the  unequal  pressure 
of  the  direct  taxes  on  the  rich  and  the  poor ;  but 
instead  of  solacing  his  defeat  with  the  narcotic  of 
virtuous  indignation  combined  with  discreet  parsi- 
mony, he  silently  raised  his  own  contribution  to 
the  level  of  his  speech." 

Intimately  associated  with  Thornton  in  residence, 
humanitarian  endeavour,  and  religious  sympathy, 
was  William  Wilberf  orce.  No  estimate  of  the  Evan- 
gelicals of  Clapham  can  be  genuinely  honest  which 
does  not  take  into  account  the  character  and  work 
of  this  extraordinary  man.  Whatever  opinion  may 
be  had  of  his  learning,  his  eloquence,  or  the  disin- 
terestedness of  his  philanthropy,  the  fact  of  his 
personal  charm  seems  beyond  cavil.  It  is  as  well 


172  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

established  as  that  of  Cardinal  Newman  himself; 
and  while  he  has  left  us  nothing  for  a  moment 
comparable  to  Newman's  work  in  letters  whereby 
to  judge  him  at  first  hand,  the  verdict  of  those  who 
came  into  social  touch  with  him,  including  so  com- 
petent a  critic  as  Madame  de  Stael,  is  practically 
unanimous.  Yet  he  was  not  without  fame  as  an 
author ;  for  his  "  Practical  View  of  the  Prevailing 
Keligious  System  of  Professed  Christians  in  the 
Higher  and  Middle  Classes  of  this  Country  con- 
trasted with  real  Christianity,"  notwithstanding  its 
portentous  title,  passed  through  some  fifty  editions 
in  as  many  years,  and  exerted,  we  are  compelled  to 
believe,  a  considerable  influence  upon  its  multi- 
tudes of  readers.  Not  least  among  its  claims  upon 
our  gratitude  is  the  comfort  which,  in  his  last 
hours,  it  brought  to  Edmiind  Burke.^ 

Nor  was  the  charity  of  this  good  man  narrowed 
by  considerations  of  personal  creed  or  pet  philan- 
thropy. He  was  a  zealous  Evangelical  Protestant, 
converted  by  an  experience  which  must  have  satisfied 
the  straitest  of  his  sect ;  and  there  is  little  reason  to 
suppose  that  he  rejected  the  orthodox  Evangelical 
interpretation  of  the  Scarlet  Woman.  This  could 
not  blind  him,  however,  to  the  burdens  which  op- 
pressed his  Catholic  countrymen ;  nor  did  he  make 
his  lifelong  championship  of  the  African  and  pre- 
occupation by  it  a  pretext  for  silence  when  silence 
would  have  seemed  politic. 

^  Essays  in  Ecclesiastical  Biography,  vol.  ii,  pp.  252-253. 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  173 

"  He  was  a  zealous  advocate  of  the  claims  of  the 
Roman  Catholics,  not  only  in  1797,  when  men's 
hearts  were  failing  them  for  fear,  and  in  1805  and 
1808,  when  even  his  own  gallant  spirit  partook  of 
the  general  consternation,  but  in  1813  and  1821, 
when  the  baser  motives  for  conciliating  that  part 
of  our  fellow-countrymen  had  ceased  to  operate.  For 
at  each  successive  period  he  was  guided  by  the  same 
immutable  conviction  that  Christian  truth  must  be 
independent  of  any  such  human  policy  as  that  which 
fettered  the  Roman  Catholics,  and  was  far  too  high 
and  holy  a  thing  to  be  defended  by  an  offensive 
and  irritating  exclusion  of  its  opponents  from  the 
exercise  of  any  political  franchise."  ^ 

When  the  alleg^ed  narrowness  of  the  Evano^elicals 
is  af&rmed,  and  legitimate  fun  is  made  of  Granville 
Sharpens  disquisition  upon  the  Little  Horn  in  the 
prophecy  of  Daniel,  it  is  for  the  candid  student  to 
recall  Wilberforce's  consistent  generosity  of  creed 
and  life,  Granville  Sharpens  loyal  comradeship  in 
service  with  a  Unitarian  like  Clarkson,  and  Thomas 
Gisborne's  delight  in  country  life,  and  the  zeal  for 
'  natural  history '  with  which  he  matched  his  devo- 
tion to  his  parish  and  his  interest  in  the  multifarious 
Clapham  philanthropies. 

I  cannot  stop  to  deal  in  any  detail  with  Isaac  Mil- 
ner,  the  robust  president  of  Queen's  College,  Cam- 
bridge, upon  whom  as  a  conversationalist  something 
of  Johnson's  mantle  seems  to  have  fallen.  He  was 
a  scholar  of  repute,  a  mathematician  of  contempo- 

^  Essays  in  Ecclesiastical  Biography,  vol.  ii,  p.  267. 


174  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

rary  eminence,  and  an  Evangelical  of  deep  convic- 
tions, though  of  somewhat  humourous  and  lethargic 
habit.  Nor  can  I  do  more  than  mention  in  this  con- 
nection Zachary  Macaulay  and  the  Trevelyans,  John 
Shore  (Lord  Teignmouth),  Charles  Simeon,  who  with 
Milner  led  the  Evangelicals  at  Cambridge,  James 
Stephen,  father  to  Sir  James  Stephen  of  the  Colonial 
Office  and  the  "  Essays  in  Ecclesiastical  Biography," 
Henry  Martyn,  and  the  Venns.  A  volume  might 
well  be  written  upon  the  last-named  family — a  fam- 
ily of  clergymen  since  Elizabethan  days,  of  sturdy 
faith  and  steady  zeal,  fearless,  practical,  shrewd, 
godly  men/  The  Henry  Venn  of  Huddersfield  was 
a  contemporary  of  Wesley,  a  mighty  cricketer  in  his 
youth,  and  the  author  of  the  "  Complete  Duty  of 
Man,"  which  is  to  be  reckoned  as  one  of  the  origi- 
nal documents  of  English  social  and  religious  history, 
so  profound  was  its  influence  upon  three  generations 
of  English  clergymen.  John,  his  son,  was  Rector  of 
Clapham,  the  immediate  spiritual  guide  of  the  Sect, 
and  one  of  the  founders  of  the  Church  Missionary 
Society.  His  son,  another  Henry,  maintained  the 
family  traditions,  and  has  been  commemorated  by 
no  less  competent  a  judge  than  Sir  Leslie  Stephen 
for  his  industry,  piety,  cheerfulness,  shrewdness,  and 
abounding  humour, — a  matter  all  the  more  ger- 
mane to  our  present  inquiry  because  Sir  LesHe  takes 

*  I  understand  that  such  a  volume  has  been  published  by  a  de- 
scendant of  the  house  within  a  year  or  two  ;  but  mj  acquaintance 
with  it  is  only  by  way  of  a  review.  , 


CLAPHAM  AND   OXFORD  175 

pains  to  note  that  this  humour  was  resolutely  kept 
out  of  his  writing,  as  though  putting  pen  to  paper 
were  too  solemn  a  business  to  allow  of  it/ 

It  is  at  this  juncture  that  an  impatient  reader 
might  well  ask  what  these  good  men  have  to  do 
with  English  literature.  Among  them  all  there  is 
no  name  of  first-rate  importance  to  letters.  The 
answer  must  be  that  the  first  generation  of  the 
Clapham  Evangelicals  had  a  deal  to  do  with  Eng- 
lish thought,  and  that  whatever  profoundly  influ- 
ences the  thought  of  a  people  is  bound  to  tell  in  a 
generation  or  two  upon  letters.  Sir  James  Stephen 
said  of  Charles  Simeon  that  "  he  waged  inexorable 
war  with  the  slumbers  and  the  slumberers  of  his 
age";  and  the  alertness  of  his  crowded  Cambridge 
congregation  which  hung  upon  words  so  earnest 
and  heart-searching  that  no  grotesqueness  of  the 
preacher's  form  or  manner  could  belittle  them, 
admirably  illustrates  the  statement.  Indeed  it  is 
well-nigh  as  applicable  to  the  Sect  in  general  as  to 
Simeon  in  particular.  The  religion  and  the  benevo- 
lence of  these  men  refused  to  rest  in  generalities. 
They  insisted  upon  coming  to  particulars,  some- 
times to  such  minute  particulars  as  to  seem  ped- 
dling and  irreverent  to  men  of  keener  aesthetic 
sense.  But  the  promoters  of  the  anti-slavery  agita- 
tion, the  Church  Missionary  Society,  the  British 
and  Foreign  Bible  Society,  and  the  inaugurators  of 
that  conscientious  concern  for  the  welfare  of  others 
^  Life  of  Sir  James  FitzJames  Stephen^  pp.  33-41. 


176  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

which  mitigated  the  severity  of  the  criminal  code, 
passed  the  Factory  Acts,  and  organized  the  multi- 
farious charities  for  which  in  the  next  generation 
Lord  Shaftesbury  stood  sponsor,  could  afford  some 
infelicities  of  form  and  manner.  Their  substance 
was  genuine  and  has  stood  the  test  of  time. 

Their  immediate  words,  as  committed  to  paper  by 
their  own  hands,  have  little  claim  to  literary  perma- 
nence. Yet  even  these  are  no  negligible  factor  in 
English  and  American  history.  The  works  of  Sim- 
eon consist  mainly  of  sermons,  sometimes  but  the 
ghastly  skeletons  of  sermons,  and  such  books  as  are 
rarely  seen  and  never  read  outside  of  clerical  libra- 
ries. But  for  his  disciples  the  breath  of  the  Spirit 
caused  these  bones  to  live  and  made  a  wonderfully 
effective  army  of  them.  Their  message  spoke  again 
in  thousands  of  English  and  American  pulpits  and 
homes.  A  corresponding  influence  was  exerted  by 
the  "  Church  History  "  of  Joseph  Milner,  as  revised 
and  carried  on  by  his  brother  Isaac,  whom  a  pupil 
once  characterized  as  a  "  sort  of  Ajax- Andromache, 
combining  such  might  with  such  sensibility  as  to 
make  him  at  once  admirable,  loveable,  and  in- 
efficient." It  is  in  no  sense  a  critical  work ;  yet  it 
possessed  qualities  which  gave  it  a  deserved  pop- 
ularity, portions  of  it  were  translated  into  Ger- 
man and  widely  read  upon  the  Continent,*  while 
it  is  scarcely  too  much  to  say  that  during  the  first 
half  of  last  century  it  was  the  generally  accepted 
*  See  Life  of  Dean  Milnerf  by  his  niece,  pp.  334,  335. 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  177 

authority  o£  English-speaking  Protestants  upon  the 
Reformation.  The  popularity  and  influence  of  Wil- 
berforce's  "  Practical  View  "  has  already  been  noted, 
and  a  hasty  reference  made  to  Granville  Sharpens 
love  of  expounding  apocalyptic  Scriptures.  These 
expositions  are  among  the  curiosities  of  literature, 
and  one  would  give  much  for  a  detailed  and  authen- 
tic account  of  the  interview  in  which  that  good  man 
and  valiant  paladin  undertook  to  convince  Charles 
James  Fox  that  Napoleon's  career  was  already  fore- 
told in  the  Little  Horn  of  the  Book  of  Daniel.  No 
one,  however,  can  better  afford  a  smile  at  his  ec- 
centricities than  this  apostle  of  freedom,  in  whom, 
as  in  Henry  Marty n,  the  age  of  chivalry  was  rein- 
carnate. His  genuine  contributions  to  history  and 
literature  are  the  pamphlets  which  he  made  the 
means  of  a  courageous  championship  of  the  cause 
of  America  during  Lord  North's  administration,  the 
conversion  of  Lord  Mansfield  to  an  interpretation 
of  English  law  which  made  slavery  impossible  at 
home,  and  the  persevering  advocacy  of  the  aboli- 
tion of  the  trade  abroad. 

A  wider  and  somewhat  different  influence  upon 
letters  was  exerted  by  Lord  Teignmouth  and  Henry 
Martyn.  John  Shore,  Lord  Teignmouth,  had  spent 
a  laborious  life  in  the  service  of  the  East  India 
Company,  and  had  advanced  by  degrees  from  the 
humble  position  of  "writer"  to  the  governor-gen- 
eralship, when  the  newly  organized  British  and 
Foreign  Bible  Society  called  him  to  a  place  which 


178  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

was  destined  to  assure  him  a  measure  of  fame  de- 
nied to  the  ruler  of  India.  As  president,  he  brought 
something  more  than  his  presence  and  name  to  the 
councils  of  the  society.  His  identification  of  himself 
with  its  interests  was  as  real  as  it  was  sympathetic. 
His  faith  in  Scripture  was  as  unquestioning  as 
that  of  Lord  Shaftesbury  himself ;  and  his  oriental 
scholarship  gave  him  a  fitness  for  the  post  which 
Lord  Shaftesbury  must  have  lacked.  He  was  the 
master  of  a  ready  but  uninspired  pen,  and  no- 
thing of  his  own  composition  ever  threatened  long 
to  survive  his  day.  But  the  work  of  the  society 
whose  policy  he  directed  is  of  distinct  moment. 
The  Sacred  Books  of  nations  exert  a  peculiar  in- 
fluence upon  their  literatures,  and  the  missionary 
teacher  and  translator  is  one  of  the  most  signifi- 
cant figures  in  the  history  of  letters  —  how  sig- 
nificant let  Ulfilas  among  missionaries,  or  Wick- 
liffe  and  Luther  among  translators,  bear  witness. 

Henry  Martyn  was  the  beau  ideal  of  missionary 
adventurers.  I  use  the  term  advisedly,  and  in  its 
worthier  sense  of  one  who  dares  something  for  a 
great  cause.  He  was  a  youth  of  romantic  temper  and 
unusual  abilities,  who,  after  a  distinguished  univer- 
sity career  which  brought  him  under  the  influence  of 
Simeon,  went  out  to  India  as  a  chaplain  of  the  East 
India  Company.  Measured  by  years,  his  life  was 
so  brief  as  to  seem  thrown  away,  for  he  died  in 
Persia,  at  the  age  of  thirty-one.  But,  reckoned  by 
character  and  deeds,  it  proved  to  be  one  of  the 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  179 

notable  careers  of  the  new  century ;  for  there  was 
a  certain  distinction  about  it  —  an  unusual  capacity 
for  ^earthly'  enjoyment,  held  subject  to  a  celestial 
ambition,  the  evidence  of  keen  intellectual  powers 
devoted  to  the  highest  good  of  others,  a  very  hu- 
man romance,  too,  of  heartily  requited  love  to  which 
circumstance  denied  the  consummation  of  marriage, 
that  made  Martyn's  life  singularly  influential  in  the 
history  of  Christian  missions.  It  served  to  inspire  a 
multitude  of  those  who  followed  him  in  the  work  of 
preaching,  teaching,  and  translating  the  literature 
of  Christian  civilization. 

As  I  have  before  intimated,  it  is  yet  too  early  to 
estimate  at  its  true  worth  the  sio^nificance  of  Chris- 
tian  missions  to  literature.  The  missionary  is  sup- 
posed to  be  generally  a  man  of  fair  natural  abilities 
and  of  good  average  training.  He  is  often  a  man 
of  the  keenest  intelligence  heightened  and  inspired 
by  the  most  benevolent  of  ambitions.  His  very 
purpose  in  going  out  leads  him  into  sympathetic 
acquaintance  with  the  deeper  things  in  the  life  of 
those  among  whom  he  labours.  It  is  the  almost 
universal  rule  that  barbarous  or  savage  peoples  find 
their  most  valiant  champions  and  most  sympathetic 
interpreters  among  missionary  workers.  Further- 
more a  prime  duty  of  the  missionary  consists  in  the 
translation  of  the  Christian  Scriptures,  together 
with  works  upon  ethics,  medicine,  grammar,  and 
elementary  science,  into  the  vernacular,  wherever 
this  has  already  reached  the  dignity  of  a  written 


180  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

language.  If  it  have  not,  then  its  development  into 
grammatical  form  becomes  one  of  his  first  tasks. 
Only  as  the  reader  ponders  upon  this  vast  world- 
movement,  with  its  direct  influence  upon  the  speech 
and  incipient  literature  of  a  thousand  languages 
or  dialects,  and  its  reflex  influence  —  no  less  real 
though  as  yet  but  partly  realized  —  upon  letters  at 
home,  can  he  grasp  the  significance  of  such  un- 
dertakings as  the  Bible  Society,  over  which  Lord 
Teignmouth  presided,  the  Church  Missionary  Soci- 
ety, of  which  John  Venn  was  the  projector,  and  the 
adventure  to  which  Henry  Martyn  gave  his  life. 
Martyn's  "Journal"  belongs  to  English  literature 
by  the  influence  which  it  has  exerted,  if  not  by 
reason  of  its  purely  literary  quality ;  as  does  the 
journal  of  David  Brainard,  and  the  lives  of  men 
like  Selwyn,  Livingstone,  and  Coleridge-Pattison, 
to  say  nothing  of  some  missionary  hymns,  which, 
like  those  of  Bishop  Heber,  have  literally  sung 
themselves  around  the  world. 

A  far  more  patent  and  generally  recognized  be- 
quest of  the  Clapham  brotherhood  to  letters  appears 
as  we  consider  the  two  families  of  Zachary  Macaulay 
and  James  Stephen,  connected  as  they  were,  or  as 
they  soon  became  by  marriage,  with  the  Venns  and 
Trevelyans.  Macaulay  is,  of  course,  one  of  the  most 
widely  known  names  in  English  literature.  The 
most  famous  exponent  of  it  had  the  good  fortune, 
as  essayist,  historian,  conversationalist,  and  poet, 
to  build  his  popularity  upon  so  substantial  a  foun- 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  181 

dation  of  talent  and  attainment  as  to  possess  every 
reasonable  assurance  of  permanent  fame.  The  "Lays 
of  Ancient  Rome"  may  not  be  great  poems;  but 
their  claim  to  popularity  is  genuine  rather  than 
specious.  They  possess  the  true  martial  lilt,  the 
gallant  note,  that  leads  boyhood  captive  at  the  first 
assault,  and  surprises  the  cooler  blood  of  middle 
age  into  a  boyish  warmth.  Withal  they  possess  a 
homely  quality  which,  without  rubbing  any  of  the 
bloom  from  romance,  still  brings  the  classic  legend 
into  touch  with  modern  life,  so  that  the  plain  man 
of  to-day  perceives  in  Horatius  and  his  fellow  heroes 
men  of  like  passions  with  himself.  Something  of 
this  same  quality  of  perfect  perspicuity  combined 
with  a  romantic  sense  shows  in  the  "  Essays  "  and 
the  "  History,"  Lord  Macaulay,  whether  he  speaks 
by  the  book  or  at  the  bidding  of  a  most  eloquent 
prejudice, is  always  intelligible,  and  generally  logi- 
cal. His  prejudice,  too,  is  almost  invariably  gener- 
ous in  so  far  as  it  attaches  itself  to  the  cause  of 
freedom  and  the  rights  of  the  many  as  opposed  to 
the  privileges  of  the  few.  He  is  no  cynic,  —  though 
he  may  occasionally  turn  a  cynical  phrase  at  the 
bidding  of  a  tyrannous  literary  instinct, — but,  as 
his  biography  shows,  a  very  tender-hearted  man ; 
though  the  man  is,  to  be  sure,  sometimes  lost  in 
the  reviewer  and  the  Whig. 

In  what  degree  did  Macaulay  inherit  the  Clap- 
ham  tradition  or  illustrate  the  Clapham  influence? 
The  most  valiant  special  pleader  must  hesitate  to 


182  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

number  him  among  the  Evangelicals.  Tender  as 
was  his  attachment  to  his  family,  it  would  be  difl&- 
cult  to  think  of  him  as  at  home  in  a  conference  of 
his  elders  upon  theological  or  missionary  topics. 
Yet  after  all,  he  is  his  father's  son.  The  Evangelical 
watch- words  are  not  congenial  to  him  ;  they  seem 
threadbare  and  jejune ;  none  the  less  he  knows  the 
sound  of  shibboleth  and  can  say  it,  if  he  chooses. 
His  characterization  of  Bunyan  is  suffused  with 
Evangelical  intelligence,  if  not  warmed  by  Evangeli- 
cal sympathy ;  and  his  definition  of  Protestantism 
in  the  essay  upon  Ranke's  "  History  of  the  Popes  " 
bears  the  Clapham  hall-mark  plain  upon  it.^  Nor 
can  any  adequate  estimate  be  formed  of  the  quality 
of  Macaulay's  style  without  taking  into  account  his 
training  in  the  Bible  and  his  saturation  with  Scrip- 
ture phraseology.  His  infant  outburst  against  the 
maid  who  had  disarranged  the  pebbles  marking  off 
his  little  garden-plot :  "  Cursed  be  Sally  !  For  it  is 
written.  Cursed  be  he  that  removeth  his  neighbour's 
landmark ! "  is  prophetic  of  the  terrible  and  rheto- 
rically exaggerated  indictment  of  Barere  at  the  close 
of  the  essay  upon  that  worthy. 

"This  makes  the  character  complete.  Whatso- 
ever things  are  false,  whatsoever  things  are  dis- 
honest, whatsoever  things  are  unjust,  whatsoever 
things  are  impure,  whatsoever  things  are  hateful, 
whatsoever  things  are  of  evil  report,  if  there  be 

1  For  a  brief  criticism  of  this  definition,  see  The  Dynamic  of  Chm- 
tianity,  Introduction. 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  183 

any  vice,  or  if  there  be  any  infamy,  all  these  things, 
we  know,  were  blended  in  Barere." 

The  passage  shows  Macaulay's  ase  of  Scripture 
at  its  worst,  but  it  illustrates  how  deeply  he  had 
drunk  of  the  spring  which  refreshed  Clapham 
speech,  even  though  in  this  instance  he  seems  to 
have  caught  but  little  of  its  essential  spirit.  The 
temptation  to  turn  a  sounding  phrase  was  always 
liable  to  betray  his  judgement;  but  upon  the  whole, 
one  is  bound  to  admit  that  in  his  books,  his 
speeches,  and  his  talk,  he  strove  to  follow  the  more 
generous  Clapham  traditions.  After  all,  his  was  a 
sort  of  reforming  eloquence,  enhanced  and  refined 
by  the  broadest  literary  cultivation  and  by  much 
contact  with  the  world.  In  it  there  was  always 
something  of  the  humanitarian  bent  of  his  father, 
Clarkson,  and  Granville  Sharpe,  though  the  eager 
zeal  which  characterized  them  had  been  bereft  of 
its  crudity  —  and  of  something  of  its  convicting 
power  as  well  —  by  passing  through  the  sieve  of 
Cambridge  and  the  "  Edinburgh  Review."  In  other 
words,  Clapham  was  to  Macaulay  as  the  enthusi- 
asm of  Exeter  Hall  at  its  best  was  to  the  benevo- 
lence of  the  more  enlightened  of  the  Whigs. 

England  and  America  have  equal  reason  for  grati- 
tude that  the  best  traditions  of  the  family  have  been 
continued  in  our  own  day  by  Sir  George  Otto  Trevel- 
yan,  in  the  memorable  "Life  of  Lord  Macaulay," 
the  "  Early  History  of  Charles  James  Fox,"  perhaps 
the  most  brilliant  historical  and  poHtical  monograph 


184  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  the  language,  and  in  the  "American  Revolu- 
tion/' a  study  of  this  momentous  quarrel  which  is  as 
sympathetic  and  intelligent  in  spirit  as  it  is  fascina- 
ting in  style.  Nor  does  the  younger  generation  of 
this  distinguished  house  lack  its  worthy  represen- 
tative in  the  field  of  letters,  as  the  growing  work 
and  repute  of  Mr.  George  Macaulay  Trevelyan 
abundantly  attest. 

As  we  turn  to  consider  the  contribution  which 
the  Clapham  Sect  made  to  life  and  letters  through 
the  family  of  James  Stephen,  a  new  problem  pre- 
sents itself.  Some  of  the  straiter  Evangelicals  brought 
the  accusation  against  Sir  James,  son  of  the  Clap- 
ham  James,  that  the  orthodoxy  of  his  "  Essays  in 
Ecclesiastical  Biography "  was  open  to  suspicion, 
especially  with  reference  to  the  doctrine  of  eternal 
punishment,  "a  doctrine  which  at  that  time  en- 
joyed considerable  popularity,"  as  Sir  Leslie  Stephen 
somewhere  says.  Could  they  have  lived  to  read  the 
works  of  his  two  sons,  James  Fitz James  and  Leslie, 
they  might  well  have  thought  that  the  nemesis  of 
heresy  had  indeed  overtaken  him.  It  should  be  re- 
membered that  these  two  brothers,  both  of  whom 
exerted  a  marked,  even  though  a  somewhat  tempo- 
rary, influence  upon  the  thought  of  their  century, 
had  a  double  claim  to  the  Clapham  heritage;  for 
their  mother,  who  was  a  daughter  of  John  Venn 
and  a  woman  of  great  beauty  and  distinction  of 
character  as  well  as  of  person,  was  native  to  the 
Common.     She  lived  to  see — and  to  see  with  a 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  185 

composure  equal  to  that  of  Charles  Lamb's  cousin 
Bridget — her  sons  not  only  accept  but  promulgate 
opinions  which  to  their  grandparents  must  have 
been  anathema. 

Concerning  the  vaKdity  of  these  views  I  am  not 
at  present  concerned  to  express  any  judgement.  The 
term  '  rationahstic  '  ^  is  hopelessly  loose  and  lacking 
in  definite  content ;  yet  it  was,  I  suppose,  dear  to 
both  these  representatives  of  an  Evangelical  family, 
and  I  venture  to  maintain  that  their  attachment  to 
it  marked  the  legitimacy  of  their  spiritual  descent. 
For  the  Calvinism  of  the  Evangelicals  was  essentially 
a  rationalistic  system  of  thought  and  faith.  True, 
the  fundamental  assumptions  were  assumptions  in- 
deed; but  then,  so  are  the  ultimate  premisses  of 
every  system  —  even  of  mathematics.  The  true  mean- 
ing of  Omnia  aheunt  in  mysteriis  is,  "  All  things 
start  in  metaphysics  as  well  as  issue  in  mystery!" 
The  premisses  having  been  assumed,  however,  the 
true  Calvinistic  method  had  primary  reference  to  the 
processes  of  logic  rather  than  the  experiences  of 
life.  It  loved  God  with  a  passion  which  was  almost 
exclusively  mental,  if  such  a  phrase  may  be  admitted. 
Thus  it  prepared  the  way  for  a  school  of  theolo- 
gians whose  influence  should  seem  to  be  altogether, 
and  should  really  be  in  part,  hostile  to  Christian 
faith,  though  they  were,  as  the  present  writer  at 

*  How  "  Rationalism  "  has  become  a  cant  term,  sacred  to  a  sect, 
may  be  seen  by  any  casual  reader  of  the  Introduction  to  Mr.  Benn*s 
recent  History  of  English  Rationalism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century. 


188  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

rian  Movement  is  so  great  that  its  very  gossip  has 
enjoyed  a  currency  denied  to  the  history  of  the 
earlier  school,  the  gleaning  of  the  grapes  of  Ox- 
ford seeming  more  to  the  public  taste  than  the 
vintages  of  Clapham.  In  spite  of  Mr.  Benn's  re- 
cent attempts  to  prove  the  contrary,  the  Oxford 
Movement  was  essentially  romantic.  It  accorded 
well  with  the  new  spirit  which  breathed  upon  the 
dry  bones  of  English  poetry  and  fiction.  This 
breath  of  revolution  could  not  fail  ultimately  to 
reach  the  Church  and  popular  thought  upon  mat- 
ters of  faith.  The  question  which  Oxford  faced 
was  whether  its  influence  should  take  the  form  of 
German  criticism  and  what  the  Common  Rooms 
called  "neology,"  or  whether  it  should  be  turned 
into  institutional  and  conservative  channels.  The 
institutional  bent  of  the  English  mind  when  deal- 
ing with  matters  of  religion  has  been  repeatedly 
exemplified,  from  the  days  of  Hooker's  "Ecclesias- 
tical Polity"  to  those  of  Maurice's  "Kingdom  of 
Christ."  The  Englishman  is  ever  a  lover  of  the 
concrete  and  tangible.  Even  the  Clapham  Evan- 
gelicals could  not  rest  until  their  vision  of  truth 
was  incarnate  in  an  Anti-Slave-Trade  agitation, 
a  Church  Missionary  Society,  a  Bible  Society,  and 
a  well-organized  attack  upon  the  brutality  of  the 
criminal  code.  Just  as  naturally  the  new  spirit  at 
Oxford  drove  those  whom  it  possessed  to  an  en- 
deavour to  realize  anew  the  life  of  the  ancient 
church,  and  to  accord  modern  Anglicanism  with  it. 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  189 

Yet  the  typical  Tractarian  was  something  more 
than  a  mere  laudator  temporis  acti.  He  found  him- 
self in  a  period  of  transition,  as  one  who  had  sud- 
denly awaked  from  sleep  and  opened  his  eyes  upon 
strange  and  half-sinister  surroundings.  Nothing  in 
such  a  case  is  more  welcome  than  a  voice  of  stalwart 
and  confident  authority.  This  he  set  himself  to  seek 
and  was  long  in  finding.  It  was  conspicuously  lack- 
ing in  the  earlier  Oriel  School,  composed  of  intelli- 
gent and  liberal-minded  men,  who  seemed  content, 
however,  to  take  the  new  day  as  it  came,  without 
much  concern  as  to  its  definitions  or  the  ultimate 
trend  of  its  influences.  This  is  not  to  characterize 
Hawkins,  Whately,  Hampden,  and  Arnold  as  men 
of  little  faith.  Instead,  their  attitude  toward  the 
future  was  confident  enough,  but  it  was  in  some 
measure  the  attitude  of  the  opportunist.  They  were 
content  to  see  the  future  come  in  an  assurance  that 
the  Spirit  of  Truth  would  supply  strength  and  wis- 
dom adequate  to  its  day.  That  is  the  attitude  of 
courage  and  hope,  but  men  who  take  it  not  infre- 
quently fall  into  the  error  of  seeming  to  ignore  the 
past,  to  be  a  little  contemptuous  of  defining  their 
position  in  the  present,  and  to  treat  authority  cava- 
lierly. Such  was  the  situation  which  Keble,  Hurrell 
Froude,  and  Newman  faced  at  Oxford  in  the  early 
thirties. 

Newman  himself  represents  an  immediate  link 
between  the  Tractarians  and  the  Evangelicals.  His 
early  training  had  been  of  a  distinctly  Evangelical 


186  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

least  ventures  to  believe,  not  only  necessary  conse- 
quences of  the  artificiality  which  had  characterized 
earlier  systems  of  religious  thought,  but  no  less 
necessary  cleavers  of  the  ground  for  the  reconstruc- 
tion of  faith  that  was  bound  to  follow. 

FitzJames  Stephen  was  a  lawyer,  journalist,  and 
judge;  Leslie  Stephen  was  preordained  to  letters, 
though  in  an  extraordinary  passage  in  his  auto- 
biography he  seems  to  express  a  half -whimsical 
doubt  whether  he  ought  not  to  have  pocketed  his 
scruples  and  followed  his  earlier  purpose  of  taking 
orders.  As  it  was,  he  became  a  most  useful  servant 
of  his  own  and  later  generations  through  his  ca- 
pacity for  an  exalted  kind  of  hack-work,  by  which 
it  is  safe  to  say  he  will  be  gratefully  remembered 
long  after  his  more  original  contributions  to  nine- 
teenth-century theology  and  ethics  have  been  for- 
gotten. Some  one  called  FitzJames  Stephen  a  Cal- 
vinist  with  the  bottom  knocked  out.  In  his  younger 
brother's  case  not  only  the  bottom  went,  but  a  ma- 
jority of  the  staves  as  well;  yet  the  significant 
thing  in  both  cases  is  rather  that  which  remained 
than  that  which  was  taken.  To  the  very  end  it 
seemed  as  thouofh  neither  could  dissociate  the 
thought  of  Christianity  from  the  theology  of  Clap- 
ham.  While  the  casual  reader  is  noting  the  points 
of  difference,  his  more  thoughtful  neighbour  is  pon- 
dering upon  the  notes  of  direct  spiritual  descent. 

"Did  you  ever  know  your  father  do  a  thing  be- 
cause it  was  pleasant?"  asked  Lady  Stephen  one 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  187 

day  of  FitzJames.  '*  Yes/'  answered  the  boy,  "  once 
—  when  he  married  you";  and  Sir  Leslie  records 
the  fact  that  his  father  once  smoked  a  cigar  but 
found  it  so  deUcious  that  he  never  smoked  again/ 
Something  of  this  same  contempt  for  selfish  indul- 
gence, the  same  exaltation  of  personal  responsi- 
biHty,  the  practical  deification  of  Duty,  appears  in 
the  life  and  work  of  the  elder  son.  It  seems  natu- 
ral that.  Utilitarian  though  he  had  become,  and 
inclined  to  base  all  action  finally  upon  the  desire 
for  happiness,  he  should  still  reply  to  his  own 
question,  "Can  you  love  such  a  Being?"  (i,  e.  as 
the  God  in  Whom  he  believes),  "  Love  is  not  the 
word  I  should  choose,  but  awe " ;  while  elsewhere 
he  records  his  conviction  that  "  conscience  is  that 
which  lies  deepest  in  a  man."  No  better  instance 
could  perhaps  be  cited  to  illustrate  the  degree  in 
which  Calvinism  is  a  translation  of  Stoicism  into 
the  terms  of  Christianity,  or  how  pervasive  and 
haunting  its  majestic  form  continues  to  be  long 
after  its  vital  fire  has  grown  cold.  To  the  end, 
despite  their  habitual  girding  at  theology,  both 
brothers  seem  to  find  their  deeper  interests  bound 
up  with  questions  of  religion,  either  upon  its  theo- 
logical or  upon  its  ethical  side. 

So  large  a  portion  of  this  chapter  has  been  given 
to  the  Evangelicals  that  I  must  deal  but  briefly 
with  their  Oxford  successors.  There  is  the  greater 
justice  in  this  because  the  fascination  of  the  Tracta- 

^  Life  of  Sir  FitzJames  Stephen,  pp.  61-63. 


190  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

type,  and  a  thorough  grounding  in  the  Bible  had 
an  influence  upon  his  style  as  marked  in  its  different 
way  as  in  the  case  of  Macaulay.  He  has  himself  set 
forth  his  indebtedness  to  Walter  Mayers  of  Pem- 
broke College,  who  put  into  his  hands  one  of  Ro- 
maine's  works  which  was  instrumental  in  confirming 
if  not  in  causing  his  conversion.  To  Thomas  Scott, 
the  famous  Evangelical  commentator,  he  says,  that, 
humanly  speaking,  he  almost  owed  his  soul.  Joseph 
Milner  supplied  him  with  his  earlier  ideas  of  Church 
history,  and  Newton  convinced  him  that  the  Pope 
was  Anti-Christ.^  It  was  only  by  degrees  that  the 
conviction  grew  upon  him  that  "  Antiquity  was  the 
true  exponent  of  the  doctrines  of  Christianity  and 
the  basis  of  the  Church  of  England."  ^  Granting 
this  conviction,  the  student  of  the  Oxford  Move- 
ment at  once  catches  a  glimpse  of  one  secret  of 
its  authority,  its  charm,  and  its  incidental  literary 
quality.  With  liberal  ideas  making  distinct  way 
in  the  University,  while  debate  upon  Catholic 
Emancipation  and  the  Reform  Bill  raged  without, 
it  was  but  natural  that  there  should  be  reaction  in 
so  conservative  an  atmosphere  as  Oxford  habitu- 
ally breathed. 

Moreover,  the  romantic  movement,  though  it  had 
pretty  nearly  spent  its  first  influence  among  men  of 
letters,  was  in  the  heyday  of  its  power  among  the 
people.  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  were  coming  to 

*  Apologia  pro  Vita  Sim^  pp.  4-7. 
2  Ibid.,  p.  26. 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  191 

their  own,  Sir  Walter  Scott,  just  dying,  was  at  the 
zenith  of  his  fame,  Byron,  just  dead,  was  a  name  to 
conjure  with.  It  was  an  opportune  moment  for  the 
revival  of  the  spirit  of  antiquity  in  religion ;  and 
the  fact  that  the  protagonists  of  this  revival  were 
men  of  uncommonly  active  imaginations  and  alert 
minds,  as  well  as  masters  of  the  peculiar  cultivation 
which  Oxford  affords,  gave  further  assurance  of  the 
influence  which  the  movement  was  bound  to  exercise 
upon  letters. 

A  passing  glance  at  the  characters  of  Keble  and 
Newman  will  suffice  to  illustrate  this.  They  were 
foreordained  to  sympathy  and  cooperation,  though 
the  circumstances  of  their  several  trainings  were 
sufficiently  diverse  to  keep  them  apart  for  a  time. 
Keble  came  up  to  Oxford  from  a  High-Church  home, 
and  while  little  more  than  a  boy,  captured  nearly 
all  the  honours  that  the  University  could  give  him. 
Though  incapable  of  self-seeking  or  any  cheap  bid- 
ding for  influence,  he  had  become  a  power  in  Oxford 
when  Newman  with  his  Evangelical  training  and 
his  liberal  tendencies  matriculated,  in  1817.  It  was 
a  memorable  day  when  a  friend  with  whom  the  fresh- 
man was  walking  suddenly  cried,  "  There's  Keble ! " 
and,  although  nothing  then  promised  an  intimacy 
between  the  two,  Newman  was  already  cherishing 
such  reports  of  Keble  and  his  ways  as  were  going 
about  the  University.  Gradually  they  drew  together, 
until,  when  Keble  preached  his  famous  sermon  on 
"  National  Apostasy,"  in  July,  1833,  the  Oxford 


192  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Movement,  which  was  to  enlist  their  common  sym- 
pathy and  command  their  united  support  for  the 
next  twelve  years,  was  fairly  launched.  Keble  was 
then  Professor  of  Poetry.  His  "  Christian  Year " 
had  been  published  in  1827.  Newman  was  Fellow 
of  Oriel,  Vicar  of  St.  Mary's,  and  a  preacher  whose 
life  and  words  were  making  him  one  of  the  notable 
formative  influences  among  a  group  of  brilliant  un- 
dergraduates and  scholars.  He  had  published  little. 
His  first  book,  "  The  Arians  of  the  Fourth  Cen- 
tury," was  just  about  to  appear,  and  most  of  the 
poems  by  which  he  is  best  known  had  been  written 
in  the  previous  winter. 

The  progress  of  the  Tractarian  Movement  as  a 
revival  of  religion,  theology,  and  ecclesiasticism  is 
a  little  beside  our  present  task.  It  remains  to  point 
out  somewhat  more  explicitly,  however,  the  singular 
place  which  it  has  occupied  in  English  letters.  The 
"  Tracts  for  the  Times  "  have  long  been  grey  with 
well-deserved  dust ;  but  the  *^  Christian  Year  "  has 
gone  wherever  English  is  read.  Like  every  collection 
of  verse  written  to  complete  a  cycle,  it  bears  here 
and  there  the  stamp  of  task-work;  yet  it  distinctly 
raised  the  tone  of  religious  poetry.  Hazlitt  once 
criticised  Campbell's  "  Pleasures  of  Hope  "  for  its 
amiable  but  general  debility,  as  though  the  author 
had  mistaken  the  decomposition  of  prose  for  the  com- 
position of  poetry,^  and  Bagehot  echoes  the  gibe  in 
his  reference  to  "  sacred  poets  "  as  those  who  thrive 

»  The  English  Poets,  p.  288. 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  193 

by  translating  the  weaker  portions  of  Wordsworth 
and  Coleridge  into  the  speech  of  women/ 

The  Oxford  Movement  is  not  guiltless  in  this 
respect;  no  revival  which  finally  assumed  so  pro- 
nounced a  ritualistic  form  could  fail  of  degeneracy, 
or  miss  the  day  when,  in  its  literature  as  in  its  wor- 
ship, the  stress  of  appeal  to  the  senses  must  stifle 
instead  of  stimulate  the  appeal  to  the  heart  and 
will.  But  at  the  beginning  it  was  not  so.  Even  the 
hectic  zeal  of  Hurrell  Froude  had  its  literary  quality. 
Ill-balanced  as  he  was,  and  i^terly  ephemeral  as  his 
influence  promised  to  be,  his  life  still  makes  its  ap- 
peal to  literature.  It  is  characteristic  of  him  and  the 
movement  which  he  did  so  much  to  inaugurate,  that 
as  this  chapter  is  written  a  stately  volume  by  an  ac- 
complished American  lady  should  appear,  to  tell 
again  the  story  of  his  brief  career,  and  that  the  pub- 
lishers should  announce  a  new  history  of  the  Re- 
vival as  a  whole.  I  chanced  the  other  day  to  take 
down  from  the  shelves  of  a  university  library  the 
same  copy  of  Mozley's  "  Reminiscences  "  which,  as 
an  undergraduate,  I  had  read  upon  its  first  publi- 
cation. The  stamp  of  untrustworthiness  was  plain 
on  almost  every  chapter  —  yet  the  volumes  were  as 
beguiling  as  ever. 

The  secret  of  this  undeniable  charm  begins  to 
appear  as  we  turn  back  to  the  "  Christian  Year," 
the  "  Lyra  Apostolica,"  and  the  "  Parochial  Ser- 

^  Literary  Studies,  vol.  i,  essay  on  the  "  Early  Edinburgh  Re- 
viewers." 


194  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

mons."  Keble  and  Newman  were  men  of  great  in- 
tellectual gifts,  fired  by  an  intense  but  controlled 
zeal  for  what  they  thought  to  be  a  great  cause.  The 
former  combined  a  fine  boyishness,  which  put  him 
at  once  into  sympathy  with  his  pupils,  with  so  deep 
a  seriousness  that  his  lightest  reproof  was  sometimes 
long  remembered.  "  Froude,"  said  he  once,  after 
his  pupil  had  entered  the  coach  to  leave  him,  "  you 
thought  Law's  '  Serious  Call '  was  a  clever  book ; 
it  seemed  to  me  as  if  you  had  said  the  Day  of  Judge- 
ment will  be  a  pretty  sight."  The  implied  rebuke 
could  as  little  be  resented  as  forgotten,  and  pro- 
duced a  profound  effect  upon  Froude's  life.  It  is  of 
value  to  us  as  illustrating  the  keenness  of  insight 
and  delicacy  of  touch  which  characterized  these  two 
leaders  of  Oxford  thought.  Both  were  responsive 
to  the  appeal  of  Nature,  Keble,  as  the  "  Christian 
Year  "  shows,  preeminently  so.  Both  were  men  of 
very  considerable  subtilty  of  mind,  combined  with 
great  simplicity  and  directness  of  address.  Though 
neither  seems  to  have  sought  a  following,  or  aspired 
to  be  the  leader  of  a  party,  their  zeal  and  purity  of 
life,  combined  with  their  discernment  of  hearts  and 
their  quick  sympathy  with  those  who  were  in  travail 
of  soul  through  intellectual  doubts,  brought  friends 
and  disciples  to  them.  Keble,  however,  remained 
relatively  in  the  background.  His  ideal  life  seems  to 
have  been  that  of  the  country  clergyman,  preaching 
to  rustics,  visiting  in  cottages,  keeping  the  flame  of 
worship  alight  on  the  altar  of  a  quiet  village  church, 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  195 

teaching  such  pupils  as  might  seek  him  in  his  re- 
tirement, and  touching  the  great  world  without 
through  the  medium  of  his  university  connections 
and  by  his  verses.  Such  gifts  and  qualities  as  these, 
enlisted  in  the  service  of  a  fine  imagination  and  a 
very  genuine  piety,  were  bound  to  work  memorable 
results.  Memorable  seems  exactly  the  word,  for  there 
is  a  haunting  quality  about  the  best  work  both  of 
Keble  and  Newman  which  grapples  the  memory  as 
with  hooks  of  steel.  Such  a  passage  as  the  two  stan- 
zas beginning  — 

Why  should  we  faint  and  fear  to  live  alone, 
Since  all  alone,  so  Heaven  has  will'd,  we  die  ? 

will  illustrate  my  meaning  in  the  case  of  Keble; 
while  Newman's  "  Lead,  Kindly  Light  "  has  become 
one  of  the  best-known  hymns  in  the  language, 
though  no  more  worthy  of  universal  appreciation 
than  the  jubilant, — 

Praise  to  the  Holiest  in  the  height,  — 
written  many  years  later ;  nor  any  more  marked  by 
a  discernment  of  the  depths  of  human  experience 
than  the  exquisite  verses  entitled  "  Sensitiveness," 
or  the  lines  upon  his  sister's  death,  beginning  — 
Death  was  full  urgent  with  thee,  Sister  dear. 

English  prose  has,  perhaps,  owned  no  master  who 
was  Newman's  equal  in  the  art  of  lucid  succinctness. 
A  volume  of  commentary  upon  the  sadly  misunder- 
stood Beatitude  concerning  the  meek  might  con- 
ceivably say  less  than  his  one  sentence,  "  Sheep  are 


196  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

defenceless  creatures ;  wolves  are  strong  and  fierce : 
yet  the  wolves  go  hungry,  and  the  sheep  are  fed." 
Keaders  who  are  very  little  in  the  way  of  reading 
sermons  may  well  give  a  half  hour  to  the  "  Parting 
of  Friends/'  with  its  poignant  text,  "Man  goeth 
forth  unto  his  work  and  to  his  labour  until  the 
evening,"  —  a  text  which  at  once  aligns  the  im- 
pending personal  separation  which  the  preacher 
had  in  mind  with  the  universal,  age-long  expe- 
rience of  Man,  the  Pilgrim  of  the  Universe.  The 
single  phrase  "poisoning  the  wells,"  whereby,  in 
his  Introduction  to  the  "  Apologia,"  he  characterizes 
certain  charges  of  his  opponents,  is  worth  reams 
of  elaborate  argument ;  while  the  "  Apologia " 
itself  is  a  great  '  human  document '  worth  almost 
as  much  to  psychology  as  to  literature,  and  at  least 
half  justifying  Mr.  Birrell's  charitable  extravagance 
when  he  spoke  of  Newman  as  one  whose  "  long  life 
has  been  a  miracle  of  beauty  and  grace,  and  who 
has  contrived  to  instill  into  his  very  controversies 
more  of  the  Spirit  of  Christ  than  most  men  can 
find  room  for  in  their  prayers."  ^ 

To  attempt  any  enumeration  of  the  works  which 
owe  their  origin  to  the  Oxford  Kevival  would  be  as 
far  beyond  my  power  as  it  is  beside  my  purpose. 
Volumes  grew  out  of  it  like  the  works  of  Hugh 
James  Eose,  Charles  Marriott,  and  Dr.  Pusey,  which 
have  no  place  in  literature  at  all.  Other  volumes, 
like  Ward's  "Ideal  of  a  Christian  Church,"  make  a 

1  outer  Dicta,  First  Series,  "  Truth-Hunting." 


CLAPHAM  AND  OXFORD  197 

sort  of  dubious  claim  upon  the  reader  because  of 
the  unique  character  of  the  author  as  well  as  the 
equally  unique  experience  of  the  book.  Public  con- 
demnation by  a  great  English  University  represents 
a  title  to  fame  not  easily  gained  during  the  last 
century ;  but  it  was  grotesque  enough  to  comport 
well  both  with  the  physical  and  mental  equipment  of 
William  George  Ward.  In  memoirs  the  Movement 
has  been  as  prolific  as  in  controversies  ;  its  "  Lives  " 
are  legion  ;  while  its  echoes,  in  "  The  Oxford  Move- 
ment "  of  Dean  Church,  and  the  "  Oxford  Coun- 
ter Reformation  "  of  J.  A.  Froude,  represent  distinct 
contributions  to  literature  as  well  as  to  the  history  of 
English  thought.  Something  of  the  mysticism  which 
was  sure  to  accompany  so  romantic  a  religious  awak- 
ening may  conceivably  have  touched  the  spirit  of  the 
Pre-Raphaelite  brotherhood,  and  certainly  inspired 
some  of  the  poetry  of  Christina  Rossetti.  It  brought 
into  being  the  splendid  translations  of  John  Mason 
Neale,  and  occasioned  the  more  popular  and  some- 
what sentimental  hymns  of  Father  Faber,  to  whom 
must  also  be  accorded  the  dubious  fame  of  writings 
upon  the  doctrine  of  Eternal  Punishment  so  lurid, 
that  for  the  moment  not  only  Newman's  terrible 
arraignment  of  the  "  Sinner  before  the  Judgement- 
Seat"  seems  mild,  but  even  the  worst  (and,  alas, 
best-known)  sermon  of  Edwards  pales  its  ineffectual 
fires .^  Nor  should  the  student  overlook  the  influence 

^  The  reader  who  is  so  ill  adyised  as  to  desire  further  acquaintance 
with  this  phase  of  Father  Faber's  work  will  find  matter  to  his  taste 


196  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  the  movement  upon  a  considerable  number  of 
men,  who,  though  never  immediately  identified  with 
it,  yet  found  their  sympathies  awakened  by  its  ideals. 
England  has  profited  inestimably  by  the  personal 
character  of  such  men  as  Mr.  Gladstone  and  Roun- 
dell  Palmer  among  her  statesmen  and  judges.  The 
fact  that  they  were  less  exceptional  than  eminent 
in  the  purity  of  their  lives  and  the  worthiness  of 
their  ambitions,  constitutes  one  of  the  most  notable 
elements  of  contrast  between  the  public  life  of  the 
third  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  and  that  of  the 
corresponding  portion  of  the  eighteenth  centuries, 
when  so  very  mundane  a  saint  as  the  Earl  of  Dart- 
mouth could  win  a  sort  of  fame  because  he  prayed, 
and  men  like  Sandwich  and  Grafton  exemplified 
the  too  general  tone  of  public  and  private  moral- 
ity among  the  upper  classes.  Whenever  this  unde- 
niable advance  in  life  and  letters  comes  to  be 
appraised,  no  small  portion  of  the  inspiration  and 
influence  which  caused  it  will  have  to  be  referred 
to  the  two  great  movements  of  religious  thought 
for  which  Clapham  and  Oxford  stand. 

in  an  article  entitled,  "  Rationalism  and  Apologetics  "  in  the  Edin- 
burgh  Review  for  July,  1906. 


CHAPTER  VII 

ELIJAH   AND   EUSHA :    CARLYLE   AND   RUSKIN 

*^  Do  make  religion  your  great  study,  Tom  ;  if  you 
repent  it,  I  will  bear  the  blame  forever."  So,  in 
1819,  wrote  Carlyle's  mother  to  her  gifted  son. 
She  hoped,  as  only  a  Scottish  mother  could,  to  see 
him  one  day  in  a  pulpit ;  but  she  longed  with  a  yet 
deeper  longing  to  make  sure  of  his  part  and  lot  in 
her  own  faith.  He  had  just  confessed  to  some  negli- 
gence in  his  reading  of  the  Bible,  but  added  the 
reassuring  fact  that  he  had  spent  the  evening  before 
with  his  favourite  Job,  and  hoped  to  do  better  in 
the  future.  That  picture  of  the  restless  and  half- 
distraught  young  teacher,  conscious  of  powers  which 
must  enable  him  to  go  far,  but  terribly  in  doubt  as 
to  the  direction  whither,  dwelling  upon  the  afflic- 
tions, contradictions,  patience,  and  integrity  of  Job, 
is  significant.  One  wonders  whether,  as  he  reached 
the  later  chapters,  which  set  forth  the  marvels  of 
earth-shaking  behemoth  and  man-defying  leviathan, 
any  whimsical  inkling  of  their  application  to  his 
own  future  character  and  fame  could  have  dawned 
upon  him.  Were  this  credible,  it  would  be  safe 
to  aver  that  the  hyperbolic  imagery  which  depicts 
the  wonders  of  great  and  unrestrained  power  must 


200  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

have  chimed  with  his  grim  humour.  He  is  the  de- 
spair of  critics,  unless,  indeed,  they  be  cock-sure 
and  shallow;  and  to  these,  as  they  turn  their  little 
phrases,  one  is  tempted  to  cry,  — 

"  Wilt  thou  play  with  him  as  with  a  bird  ?  or  wilt 
thou  bind  him  for  thy  maidens  ?  I  will  not  conceal 
his  parts,  nor  his  power,  nor  his  comely  proportion. 
Out  of  his  mouth  go  burning  lamps,  and  sparks  of 
fire  leap  out.  He  beholdeth  all  high  things ;  he  is 
a  king  over  all  the  children  of  pride." 

In  his  "Reminiscences"  Carlyle  says  of  his 
father : — 

"  In  anger  he  had  no  need  of  oaths :  his  words 
were  like  sharp  arrows  that  smote  into  the  very 
heart.  The  fault  was  that  he  exaggerated  (which 
tendency  I  also  inherit),  yet  .  .  .  for  the  sake 
chiefly  of  humourous  effect." 

So  ingrained  was  this  humour  and  so  incorrigi- 
ble and  often  unrestrained  was  the  habit  of  exag- 
geration, that  it  is  only  in  terms  of  half-whimsical 
hyperbole  that  the  man  can  be  set  forth.  Words  of 
measured  truth  and  soberness  take  hold  upon  him 
as  little  as  arrow  and  spear  upon  the  armour  of 
leviathan.  Hence  I  incline  to  credit  our  greatest 
master  of  rhetorical  extravagance  with  the  most 
comprehensive  and  approximately  just  verdict  upon 
his  character.  Carlyle,  says  Mr.  Swinburne,  was  a 
typical  sturdy  peasant,  "  brave,  honest,  affectionate, 
laborious,  envious,  ungrateful,  malignant,  and  self- 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  201 

ish."  *  The  list  is  as  portentous  as  a  group  of  Mr. 
Swinburne's  adjectives  must  always  be,  but,  if  there 
be  libel  here,  it  is  in  the  implied  estimate  of  the 
peasant  in  general  rather  than  in  the  expressed 
judgement  upon  Carlyle  in  particular. 

To  call  him  selfish  is  only  to  reiterate  a  fact  that 
lies  patent  upon  the  pages  of  his  own  reminiscences 
and  his  wife's  journal ;  and  the  adjective  must  still 
stand,  after  all  allowance  has  been  made  for  her 
somewhat  ungracious  nature,  the  greatness  of  the 
tasks  that  absorbed  him,  and  the  fact  that  most 
husbands  engaged  in  preoccupying  duties  seem 
selfish  to  their  wives,  —  who  shall  say  without  just 
cause  ?  "  Malignant "  is  a  heavy  word  and  not  to  be 
lightly  used.  So  good  a  man  as  Thomas  Arnold 
blotted  a  page  of  his  own  biography  by  writing  the 
"Oxford  Mahgnants"  for  the  "Edinburgh."  But 
even  he  did  not  venture  to  call  the  author  of  the 
"  Christian  Year  "  an  ass.  Carlyle  did  so,  and  went 
on  not  only  to  designate  Keats  as  a  "  Vessel  of 
Hell,"  but  to  characterize  his  biography  as  a  "  Fricas- 
see of  dead  dog."  ^ 

No  other  man  of  his  day,  not  even  Hazlitt,  could 
have  brought  himself  to  be  so  consistently  con- 

*  Nineteenth  Century^  vol.  xv,  p.  604. 

'  Justice  perhaps  requires  a  citation  of  the  paragraph,  though  to 
lovers  of  Keats  it  may  intensify  rather  than  mitigate  Carlyle's  of- 
fence. "  The  kind  of  man  he  [i.  e.  Keats]  was  gets  ever  more  hor- 
rible to  me.  Force  of  hunger  for  pleasure  of  every  kind,  and  want 
of  all  other  force  .  .  .  such  a  structure  of  soul,  it  would  once  have 
been  very  evident,  was  a  chosen  '  Vessel  of  HelL' " 


202  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

temptuous  or  so  incidentally  nasty  —  there  seems 
to  be  no  other  word — toward  Coleridge  and  Lamb, 
as  was  Carlyle.  Nor  is  it  possible  to  explain  away 
the  exasperating  patronage  with  which  he  endured 
men  and  women  of  eminence  whom  he  could  find 
no  cause  to  damn,  or  the  faint  praise  wherewith  he 
did  damn  Mill,  except  upon  the  ground  of  a  self- 
conceit  that  made  him  envious  of  all  abilities  and 
powers  comparable  to  his  own.  He  could  not  see  his 
wife  shine  at  her  brilliant  best  in  company  without 
irritation,  nor  could  she  quite  do  her  best  apparently 
without  some  whetting  of  her  wits  at  his  expense ; 
a  mutual  attitude  which  lends  point  to  the  remark 
'^  that  after  all  it  is  well  they  married  each  other ; 
since,  had  they  not,  there  might  have  been  four 
unhappy  people  in  the  world  instead  of  two."  The 
famous  phrase,  ^'mostly  fools,"  whereby  he  chose 
to  designate  twenty  or  thirty  millions  of  his  fellow 
citizens,  has  its  humourous  side,  and  may  easily  be 
forgiven  him ;  yet,  like  the  little  Book  in  the  Apo- 
calypse, its  dubious  sweetness  in  the  mouth  speedily 
turns  to  bitterness;  while  his  exasperating  refer- 
ences to  Miss  Martineau  as  "the  good  Harriet" 
after  her  unwearied  and  successful  efforts  in  his 
service;  the  contempt  with  which  he  loved  to 
characterize  the  authorities  by  whose  aid  he  had 
built  the  great  structures  of  the  "  Revolution  "  and 
"  Frederick  "  ;  to  say  nothing  of  his  attitude  toward 
people  who,  like  the  BuUers,  had  honestly  striven 
to  befriend  him  in  a  day  when  friends  were  worth 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  203 

his  having,  all  suggest  a  starveling  sense  of  grati- 
tude. 

On  the  other  hand,  what  student  can  fail  to  pay- 
homage  to  the  enormous  labour  which  went  to  the 
making  of  his  books  —  books,  be  it  remembered, 
which,  even  when  historical,  were  still  works  of  the 
poetic  imagination  in  such  degree  as  would  have 
seemed  to  justify  a  less  diligent  man  in  treating  the 
toil  of  research  lightly. 

"  The  French  Revolution  stands  pretty  fair  in 
my  head,  nor  do  I  mean  to  investigate  much  more 
about  it,  but  to  splash  down  what  I  know  in  large 
masses  of  colours,  that  it  may  look  like  a  smoke 
and  flame  conflagration  in  the  distance."  ^ 

Thus  he  describes,  and  with  wonderful  truth,  the 
scheme  of  his  great  impressionist  panorama;  but 
he  does  not  say,  though  the  world  knows  to-day, 
how  mightily  he  had  toiled  at  his  ^  sources,'  nor 
with  what  general  good  effect,  in  spite  of  all  that 
later  critics  have  striven  to  show  to  the  contrary. 
Affectionate,  too,  he  was,  in  his  own  fashion,  no  less 
than  laborious ;  and  the  fashion  was  a  good  one  in 
some  cases,  as  in  his  relations  with  his  parents  and 
the  old  home  circle ;  while  in  others  it  took  too 
much,  far  too  much,  for  granted,  as  he  finally 
learned  in  the  case  of  his  wife.  As  for  his  honesty 
and  courage,  it  would  be  superfluous  almost  to  the 
point  of  impertinence  to  go  about  to  prove  them, 
so  plainly  do  they  speak  through  both  his  works 
1  Quoted  by  Nicol,  Thomas  Carlyle,  p.  73. 


201  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  days.  "  I  will  not  quit  the  game  while  faculty 
is  given  me  to  try  playing,"  is  the  characteristically 
picturesque  utterance  of  his  resolve  again  to  attack 
the  "  French  Kevolution  "  after  the  burning  of  the 
first  volume  in  manuscript ;  and  it  is  pleasant  to 
remember  that  his  consideration  for  the  distress  of 
his  friend  Mill,  in  whose  house  the  disaster  had  oc- 
curred, was  as  admirable  as  the  courage  wherewith 
he  girded  himself  to  repair  the  loss. 

His  honesty  is  as  plainly  written  on  his  life's 
work  as  his  courage.  He  liked  to  dignify  the  word 
with  a  capital  initial,  and  to  proclaim  as  his  gospel 
to  the  age  his  scorn  and  hatred  of  all  that  loved  or 
made  a  lie.  Whether  it  were  possible  for  the  finest 
sense  of  honour  to  dwell  in  the  same  mind  with 
prejudices  so  portentous  as  those  he  harboured,  I 
do  not  undertake  to  say ;  but  it  is  indubitable  that 
no  man  of  genius  was  ever  further  from  consenting 
to  conceal  or  modify  his  convictions  for  the  sake 
of  popular  favour  or  any  material  advantage  which 
might  conceivably  issue  from  it. 

Upon  the  whole  the  millions  of  his  readers,  and 
the  other  millions  whose  thought  has  been  uncon- 
sciously moulded  by  his  influence  —  "  mostly  fools  " 
be  it  remembered  —  have  dealt  well  with  him.  Mr. 
Froude  will  yet  come  to  his  own  in  the  matter  of 
the  "  Reminiscences "  and  the  "  Life."  There  is 
a  sense  in  which  just  such  a  literary  executor  was 
needed.  Carlyle  was  true  to  himself  in  permitting 
or  enjoining  the  publications  that  have  tried  his 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  205 

admirers  most  sorely ;  Mr.  Froude  was  never  more 
loyal  to  his  master  or  to  truth  than  when  he  ful- 
filled the  behest ;  for  Carlyle's  life  was  too  great  to 
make  a  prettily  consistent  story.  Even  a  little  man, 
in  so  far  as  he  is  a  man  at  all,  defies  our  definitions 
and  puts  our  formulas  to  shame ;  personality  being 
impatient  of  such  things.  In  Carlyle's  case,  the 
attempt  to  sum  him  up,  label  or  number  him,  and 
assign  him  to  his  appropriate  shelf,  is  as  hopeless 
as  an  effort  to  describe  the  varied  year  in  terms  of 
any  given  week  in  it.  The  things  said  may  be  true ; 
it  is  in  point  of  scope  and  application  to  the  whole 
that  they  are  impotent. 

He  who  would  tell  the  truth  about  Carlyle  must 
make  large  demands  upon  his  vocabulary  of  dis- 
junctive particles,  ^but,'  'yet,'  and  though.'  He 
did  not  like  the  Jews ;  yet  his  attitude  of  mind  and 
his  literary  style  were  both  Hebraistic.  He  could 
not  endure  Scottish  Presbyterianism,  except  perhaps 
as  embodied  in  his  parents;  yet  in  many  respects 
he  was  the  most  eloquent  and  consistent  Calvinist 
of  his  generation.  Scarce  any  contemporary  was  so 
keen  to  discern  the  joints  in  an  adversary's  armour 
of  dialectic,  or  so  sure  to  pierce  them ;  yet  he  was 
no  '  logician,'  and  esteemed  too  lightly  a  conviction 
induced  by  close  reasoning.  His  arsenal  was  doubt- 
less well  stored  with  syllogisms;  but  for  aught  he 
cared  they  might  rot  unused^  while  he  wielded  wea- 
pons—  always  of  offence — more  to  his  mind. 

Critics  and  expositors  have  not  been  wanting  who 


206  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

have  undertaken  to  articulate  Carlyle's  faith  into  a 
system  and  to  appraise  his  religious  influence.  The 
task  is  frankly  impossible,  in  large  part  for  a  reason 
which  lay  very  close  to  the  secret  of  his  influence, 
as  I  shall  try  to  indicate. 

His  was  an  intensely  religious  soul.  He  was  a 
true  son  of  his  parents,  a  legitimate  scion  of  the 
Calvinistic  stock.  Its  fundamental  idea,  the  Sov- 
ereignty of  God,  was  ineradicably  ingrained  in  him. 
There  is  about  that  idea  a  certain  majesty,  whole- 
someness,  and  freedom  from  sentimentality  that 
appealed  to,  and  at  the  same  time  fed  the  deeper 
tastes  of,  his  essentially  wholesome  nature.  In  keep- 
ing, too,  with  the  Calvinistic  austerity  of  conscience 
was  a  fierce  hunger  and  thirst  after  righteousness, 
whereby,  as  Mr.  Andrew  Lang  has  finely  said,  his 
life  was  almost  physically  vexed.  There  is  indeed 
no  accounting  for  Carlyle  except  upon  the  basis  of 
religion.  This  I  think  he  would  have  granted  em- 
phatically, because  he  was  always  preaching  it.  Only 
when  you  attempted  to  show  that  it  was  your  es- 
pecial type  or  definition  of  religion  that  accounted 
for  him,  would  he  as  indubitably  have  turned  and 
rent  you ;  for  here  he  was  an  individualist  almost 
without  qualification.  To  his  own  master  he  and 
every  other  man  stood  or  fell.  For  the  religion 
which  was  wrought  out  of  each  man's  experience, 
in  so  far  as  it  was  honestly  inspiring  and  subduing, 
he  had  vast  respect.  Toward  men's  necessary  at- 
tempts to  formulate  their  experience  and  to  organize 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  207 

its  results  into  some  body  like  the  Church,  with  its 
worship  and  its  confession,  he  was  critical  to  the 
point  of  hostility.  Indeed  he  seems  to  have  had  little 
sense  of  the  worth  of  corporate  religion,  as  he  had 
little  practical  sense  of  the  problems  involved  in  any 
form  of  corporate  life  or  government.  Despite  his 
outcry  against  art  in  general  he  was  a  great  artist ; 
but  in  the  fundamental  art  of  living  with  his  fellows 
he  was  a  novice  to  the  end. 

In  many  respects,  as  has  been  already  intimated, 
he  stood  in  the  succession  of  the  Hebrew  prophets. 
Not  long  after  his  death  Professor  Seeley  wrote :  — 

"I  admire  as  much  as  others  this  striking  re- 
appearance of  the  Hebrew  prophet  in  the  modern 
world.  No  mere  echo  or  literary  imitation  of  Hebrew 
prophecy,  but  the  thing  itself :  the  faculty  of  seeing 
moral  evils  which  others  are  too  drowsy  to  see,  and 
of  seeing  them  as  distinctly  as  if  they  were  material 
objects,  the  sublime  impatience,  the  overwhelming 
denunciation  .  .  .  this  is  what  I  see  in  his  best 
writings,  —  in  '  Past  and  Present,'  and  some  of  the 
'  Latter-Day  Pamphlets.' "  ^ 

But  the  likeness  extended  further.  The  vision  of 
this  latter-day  seer  was  partial  as  well  as  vivid.  To 
use  the  well-worn  figure,  he  stood  like  a  watcher 
upon  some  mountain-top  overlooking  a  wide  ex- 
panse of  misty  landscape.  The  valleys  beneath  his 
feet,    with  great  stretches  of   the  lands  beyond, 

^  J.  R.  Seeley,  "Political  Somnambulism,"  Macmillan*s  Maga* 
zine.  Cf.  Scribner^s  Magazine^  vol.  xxii,  p.  142. 


208  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

were  hidden ;  but  some  peaks,  with  here  and  there 
a  larger  expanse  of  upland,  loomed  clear.  Upon 
these  he  fixed  an  intense  regard;  concerning  them 
he  made  report  with  a  rugged  and  vehement  elo- 
quence that  caused  the  ears  of  two  generations  to 
tingle.  He  was  perfectly  confident  of  some  things 
of  utmost  import;  he  could  discern  certain  goals 
worth  attainment  at  whatever  cost,  certain  pitfalls 
and  snares  which  it  was  as  needful  to  shun ;  but  it 
was  beyond  his  power  to  map  the  way  in  any  de- 
tail. 

This  does  not  imply  that  he  is  worthless  as  a  guide; 
for  the  very  fact  of  his  own  consciousness  that  so 
much  of  human  fate  is  hid  in  mystery  led  him  to 
declare  with  true  Carlylean  emphasis — one  could  say 
no  more  —  a  few  great  principles  for  the  soul's 
guidance  in  all  exigencies.  Keligion  was  a  funda- 
mental necessity  to  man.  No  soul  could  complete  its 
life  even  here  in  this  present  world  without  it ;  since 
atheism  is  the  practical  denial,  not  of  God  only,  but 
of  the  most  significant  attributes  of  man.  The  truth 
is  always  of  God,  and  no  true  man  will  fail  to  accept 
it  or  fear  its  consequences :  a  lie  is  as  inevitably  of 
the  Devil ;  however  fitted  to  the  moment's  need  its 
fruits  promise  to  be,  they  will  upon  trial  mock  the 
soul's  hunger  like  apples  of  Sodom.  The  great  God 
Circumstance,  whom  the  majority  worship,  —  so  far 
forth  deserving  his  contemptuous  "mostly  fools," 
—  is  after  all  but  a  despicable  deity,  to  be  subjected 
to  the  hewing  of  man's  wood  and  the  drawing  of  his 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  209 

water.  Man  would  seem  to  be  meant  to  be  Captain 
of  his  Soul  and  Master  of  Fate ;  but  even  if  the  plan 
miscarry  and  Fate  overcome  him,  he  can  at  least 
defy  mere  circumstance  to  the  end.  There  is  a  good 
deal  of  this  latter  teaching,  by  implication  if  not  by 
precept,  in  Carlyle.  He  reminds  us  sometimes  of  an 
Indian  warrior  bound  to  the  stake  and  conscious  of 
inevitable  doom,  but  solacing  his  pain  by  hurhng 
defiance  at  his  executioners ;  and  characteristically 
enough  the  reminiscence  is  most  vivid  when  with 
voluminous  and  eloquent  verbosity  he  chants  the 
worth  of  silence  in  face  of  Fate's  blows  and  hfe's 
contradiction. 

The  inconsistency  which  appears  here  is  one  of 
his  most  notable  characteristics,  and  its  Hebrew  type 
will  be  recalled  by  every  reader  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. The  Hebrew  prophet  rarely  qualified  his  state- 
ments. In  teaching  he  spoke  as  though  there  were 
nothing  more  to  be  said  upon  that  particular  point. 
Much  of  the  New  Testament,  too,  needs  to  be  read 
in  the  light  of  this  principle,  or  it  must  remain  a 
mass  of  exaggerated  and  strangely  contradictory 
apothegms.  In  point  of  fact  the  contradictions  of 
Scripture  are  among  the  most  significant  and  neces- 
sary features  of  its  literary  style.  The  truth  was  re- 
vealed to  the  prophet  in  general  outUne  and  mass. 
He  in  turn  revealed  it  to  his  hearers ;  yet  not  so 
much  by  an  effort  to  assemble  its  details  into  a  con- 
sistent whole,  as  by  a  succession  of  clear  and  some- 
times startling  glimpses,  now  from  this  side  and  now 


210  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

from  that,  so  that  in  the  result  his  words  often  seem 
contradictory.  They  are  so  only  as  the  views  of  a 
harbour  or  a  coastline,  toward  which  one  is  labori- 
ously beating  up  against  a  head-wind,  change  with 
the  different  tacks.  Thus  the  prophet  sings  of  mercy 
and  judgement,  not  qualifying  one  by  the  other,  but 
thrusting  them  into  a  juxtaposition  which  at  first 
sight  seems  hopelessly  unnatural.  The  Sermon  on 
the  Mount,  when  set  side  by  side  with  the  other  teach- 
ings of  Christ,  needs  to  be  interpreted  in  the  light 
of  this  fact.  Christ  was  a  stranger  to  theological  di- 
alectic. There  is  no  single  discourse  of  His  which 
bears  the  mark  of  careful  and  laboured  logical  ar- 
rangement. On  the  other  hand,  after  the  true  East- 
ern fashion,  He  abounds  and  seems  to  delight  in  ex- 
treme statements  and  injunctions  almost  impossible 
of  fulfilment ;  nor  does  He  hesitate  to  contradict 
Himself  at  times.  The  attempts  to  soften  Scripture 
phraseology  are  really  attempts  to  emasculate  it. 
Ruggedness,  strenuousness,  and  a  sort  of  exaggera- 
tion, are  of  its  essence.  We  are  to  take  no  thought 
for  the  morrow,  —  one  half  regrets  its  qualification 
into  "  anxious  thought," — but  on  the  other  hand  we 
are  expected  to  discern  the  signs  of  the  times  and 
lay  our  plans  to  profit  by  them.  We  are  to  "hate  " 
father  and  mother  if  need  be  for  the  Gospel's  sake ; 
but  it  is  no  less  true  that  the  man  who  makes  religion 
an  excuse  for  slackness  in  filial  duty  or  respect  is  a 
hypocrite  of  hypocrites.  The  man  smitten  upon  one 
cheek  is  exhorted  to  turn  the  other  also ;  but  no  less 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  211 

strenuously  exhorted  to  sell  his  cloak  if  need  be  and 
buy  a  sword.  The  twistings  and  turnings  of  commen- 
tator and  apologist  in  their  fruitless  endeavours  to 
harmonize  these  contradictory  passages  would  be 
amusing  if  they  did  not  threaten  the  deeper  integ- 
rity of  Scripture.  The  Gospel  is  not  a  body  of  in- 
junctions laid  upon  men  with  a  view  to  the  prede- 
termination of  conduct  in  every  possible  exigency 
of  life.  It  is  rather  an  introduction  to  the  Spirit 
Who  is  meant  to  inhabit  and  inspire  a  man  in  such 
degree  as  to  insure  his  development  along  right  lines, 
and  make  him,  under  all  circumstances,  equal  to  life's 
demands.  Hence  the  general  religious  sense  of  men 
has  been  right  in  insisting  upon  the  supremacy 
of  the  Law  of  Love  to  God  and  fellow-man,  and 
equally  right  in  refusing  to  permit  the  exaltation 
of  any  isolated  utterance  into  an  instrument  of 
tyranny. 

No  word  of  this  apparent  digression  has  been 
written  with  a  view  to  suggesting  a  comparison 
between  Carlyle's  message  and  that  of  the  Gospels. 
Yet  it  is  true  that  his  approach  to  his  readers  is 
after  the  Scripture  manner.  He,  "like  Ruskin, 
keeps  himself  right  not  by  caveats,  but  by  contra- 
dictions of  himself,  and  sometimes  in  a  way  least 
to  be  expected."*  It  was  never  his  lot  "to  see  life 
steadily  and  see  it  whole."  He  saw  life  fitfully, 
and  saw  its  disjecta  membra  rather ;  but  his  vision 
was  amazingly  vivid,  and   he  was  haunted  by  a 

»  Nicol,  Thomas  Carlyle,  p.  215. 


212  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

sense  that  these  fragments  were  meant  to  go  to- 
gether if  only  one  might  discover  the  secret  of 
integrity.  That,  if  it  were  ever  revealed  to  him,  he 
never  taught  in  its  fulness;  though  he  did  teach 
with  almost  unexampled  cogency  and  power  cer- 
tain essential  factors  in  its  formula. 

It  is  here  that  the  distinctive  difference  between 
his  teaching  and  that  of  Scripture  lies.  The  latter, 
beneath  its  surface  contradictions,  rests  upon  a 
fundamental  principle  of  unity,  which  comes  to 
the  surface  in  Christ  and  visualizes  itself  for  all 
time  and  all  men.  Carlyle  grasped  the  Old  Testa- 
ment elements  of  this  and  strove  to  exploit  them, 
in  season  and  out  of  season,  for  the  benefit  of  a 
day  which  sorely  needed  exactly  that  message.  His 
century  was  just  awakening  to  a  sense  of  its  oppor- 
tunity and  the  promise  of  its  material  advance.  It 
was  prone  to  prophesy  smooth  things  to  itself  when 
Carlyle's  eloquent  discord  smote  upon  its  ear :  "  I 
do  not  want  cheaper  cotton;  swifter  railways;  I 
want  what  Novalis  calls  ^God,  Freedom,  and  Im- 
mortality.' Will  swift  railways  and  sacrifices  to 
Hudson^  help  me  toward  that?"  One  does  not 
wonder  that  he  impressed  Emerson  with  his  posses- 
sion of  "  The  strong  religious  tinge  you  sometimes 
find  in  burly  people.  That,  and  all  his  qualities, 

*  Hudson's  once  famous  name  has  passed  into  such  oblivion  that 
the  reader,  especially  the  American  reader,  may  need  to  be  re- 
minded that  he  was  the  railway  *  promoter '  par  excellence  of  Car- 
lyle's day. 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  213 

have  a  certain  virulence,  coupled  though  it  be  in 
his  case  with  the  utmost  impatience  of  Christendom 
and  Jewdom  and  all  existing  presentments  of  the 
good  old  story."  ^  With  this  general  judgement 
such  different  men  as  Chalmers  and  Newman  sub- 
stantially agree.  The  former  was  quick  to  recog- 
nize Carlyle's  fundamentally  religious  nature  and 
his  considerable  rehgious  influence ;  but  his  mature 
verdict  was  "He  is  a  lover  of  earnestness  rather 
than  a  lover  of  truth."  Newman  wrote  to  his  sister 
in  1839,  "  The  writer  [i.  e.  Carlyle]  has  not  very 
clear  principles  and  views,  but  they  are  very  deep," 
a  criticism  as  characteristic  of  Newman  as  it  was 
true  of  Carlyle. 

In  view  of  the  rugged  and  fragmentary  nature 
of  his  teaching,  its  frequent  note  of  denial  and 
scorn,  his  utter  inability  to  map  out  a  coherent 
and  practicable  scheme  for  the  conduct  of  individ- 
ual or  social  life,  and  his  almost  unintermittent 
wail  of  weariness  and  self-pity,  as  though  life  were 
an  agony  without  significant  "why"  or  "where- 
fore," one  is  tempted  to  repeat  Carlyle's  own  ques- 
tion about  John  Sterling:  "Why  has  a  Biography 
been  inflicted  on  this  man;  why  has  not  No-biog- 
raphy and  the  privilege  of  the  weary  been  his 
lot?"^  The  answer  is  that  there  is  something 
titanic  and  Dantesque  about  his  spiritual  experi- 
ence. Its  fragmentary  character  enhances  its  vivid- 

*  "  Impressions  of  Thomas  Carlyle,"  Scribner's  Magazine,  1881. 
'  Life  of  Sterlingf  p.  5. 


214  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ness.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  the  testimony  of  a 
man  who  antagonized  and  scorned  the  prim  ortho- 
doxies of  his  day  so  vehemently  is  worth  more 
to  religion  than  the  well-considered  witness  of 
many  saints.  His  immediate  debt  to  religion  was 
very  great.  Notable  as  was  his  capacity  for  scorn, 
there  were  depths  of  reverence  in  him,  and  the 
picture  which  he  has  himself  drawn  of  a  visit  to 
the  Ecclefechan  cottage  late  one  evening,  and  his 
waiting  at  the  door  in  quiet,  almost  prayerful  grati- 
tude, because  he  heard  his  father's  voice  within 
"making  worship,"  is  as  fine  in  its  way  as  "The 
Cottar's  Saturday  Night."  Carlyle,  like  Burns,  dis- 
cerned the  hidings  of  Scotland's  power.  Though 
far  less  dependent  than  his  great  disciple,  Ruskin, 
upon  the  language  of  religion  and  its  oracles  for 
rhetorical  effect,  he  none  the  less  drew  largely 
upon  the  recognized  forms  of  religious  experience 
and  expression  in  the  voicing  of  his  message.  The 
story  of  the  conversion  in  Leith  Walk,  which  of 
itself  must  have  sufficed  to  make  "  Sartor"  memo- 
rable, might  unquestionably  have  been  differently 
phrased;  but  the  fact  that  it  was  told  under  the 
forms  of  religion  heightened  its  significance  be- 
cause it  revealed  its  deeper  truth.  To  call  it  a 
"conversion"  was  no  mere  convention  of  speech; 
a  fact  which  Carlyle  realized  far  better  than  some 
of  his  more  orthodox  critics;  for  the  essence  of 
religious  conversion  is  a  yielding  of  the  life  to  the 
guidance  and  companionship  of  the  Spirit  of  Truth 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  215 

—  the  Divine  resident  in  the  world  of  nature  and 
in  the  heart  of  man  so  far  as  man  will  admit  Him. 
In  a  very  real  sense  the  deeper  integrity  of  Car- 
lyle's  life  and  influence  hinges  upon  the  revelation 
made  to  him  that  day  and  his  allegiance  to  its  im- 
port and  its  Author.  It  is  beside  the  mark  to  say 
that  he  did  not  always  sound  the  note  of  this  new 
message  clear  and  strong ;  few  human  servants  fail 
to  be  occasionally  unprofitable,  and  few  human  in- 
struments always  keep  in  tune.  The  struggle  for 
the  "  Everlasting  Yea  "  was  not  immediately  success- 
ful ;  indeed,  like  the  battle  of  the  prophet's  vision, 
it  was  sometimes  with  confused  noise  and  garments 
rolled  in  blood;  yet,  the  idea  of  it  never  passed 
into  permanent  eclipse.  The  seer  chose  to  write  his 
message  in  many  different  and  seemingly  contra- 
dictory forms, — one  is  tempted  to  say  that  Carlyle 
liked  to  give  his  very  blessing  suh  specie  damna- 
tionis,  —  but  soon  or  late  he  always  struck  a  posi- 
tive note. 

I  have  said  that  an  attempt  to  systematize  this 
message  would  appear  to  be  an  almost  gratuitous 
impertinence,  inasmuch  as  it  never  revealed  itself 
to  the  messenger  himself  in  systematic  form ;  yet 
a  writer  in  the  "St.  James's  Gazette"  soon  after 
Carlyle's  death  presented  the  main  points  in  it  at 
once  so  fairly  and  so  clearly,  that  I  venture  to  quote 
a  part  of  his  summary. 

"  He  also  thought  that  the  truths  which  Calvin- 
ism tried  to  express,  and  succeeded  in  expressing 


216  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  an  imperfect  or  partially  mistaken  manner,  were 
the  ultimate  governing  principles  of  morals  and 
politics,  of  whose  systematic  neglect  in  this  age 
nothing  but  evil  could  come.  .  .  .  What  then  was 
his  creed  ?  .  .  .  First,  he  believed  in  God ;  secondly, 
he  believed  in  an  absolute  opposition  between  good 
and  evil ;  thirdly,  he  believed  that  all  men  do,  in 
fact,  take  sides  more  or  less  decisively  in  this  great 
struggle,  and  ultimately  turn  out  to  be  either  good 
or  bad  ;  fourthly,  he  believed  that  good  is  stronger 
than  evil,  and  by  infinitely  slow  degrees  gets  the 
better  of  it,  but  that  this  process  is  so  slow  as  to 
be  continually  obscured  and  thrown  back  by  evil 
influences  of  various  kinds  —  one  of  which  he  be- 
lieved to  be  specially  powerful  in  the  present  day. 
.  .  .  The  great  fact  about  each  particular  man  is 
the  relation,  whether  of  friendship  or  enmity,  in 
which  he  stands  to  God.  .  .  .  All  (i.  e.  good  and 
bad  men)  pass  alike  through  this  mysterious  hall  of 
doom  called  life;  most  show  themselves  in  their 
true  colours  under  pressure.  .  .  .  Let  us  bring  out 
as  far  as  may  be  possible  such  good  as  man  has  had 
in  him  since  his  origin.  Let  us  strike  down  the 
bad  to  the  hell  that  gapes  for  him.  This,  we  think, 
or  something  like  this,  was  Mr.  Carlyle's  transla- 
tion of  election  and  predestination  into  politics  and 
morals.  .  .  .  There  is  not  much  pity  and  no  salva- 
tion worth  speaking  of  in  either  body  of  doctrine ; 
but  there  is  a  strange,  and  what  some  might  regard 
as  a  terrible,  parallelism  between  these  doctrines 
and  the  inferences  that  may  be  drawn  from  physi- 
cal science.  The  survival  of  the  fittest  has  much  in 
common  with  the  doctrine  of  election,  and  philo- 
sophical necessity,  as  summed  up  in  what  we  now 


ELUAH   AND  ELISHA  217 

call  evolution,  comes  practically  to  much  the  same 
result  as  predestination."  ^ 

Whether  the  reader  accept  this  interpretation  of 
Carlyle's  message  or  not,  none  can  deny  the  inspira- 
tion which  it  brought  to  great  numbers  of  thought- 
ful young  men  who  were  to  become  the  leaders  of  the 
two  generations  which  passed  across  the  stage  be- 
tween the  date  of  "Sartor  Kesartus  "  and  the  end  of 
the  century.  At  first  sight  it  seems  strange  that  a 
message  which  was  so  often  wrapt  in  the  forms  of 
doubt  and  denial  should  have  proved  so  generally 
positive.  Its  positive  essence  lay  in  Carlyle's  glorifi- 
cation of  Duty ;  in  his  emphasis  upon  work  as  a 
necessity  to  the  completion  of  man's  physical  and 
moral  stature ;  and  perhaps  most  of  all  in  his  un- 
shaken behef  that  men  themselves,  as  Professor 
Wallace  has  said, "are  but  earthly  vestures  of  spirit- 
ual forces."  This  proved  a  truth  of  fundamental 
import  to  a  day  which  was  in  danger  of  measuring 
all  things  by  material  standards,  and  of  denying 
reahty  itself  to  everything  that  was  not  susceptible 
of  expression  in  the  formulas  of  physics,  mechanics, 
or  chemistry.  On  the  other  hand,  a  considerable 
portion  of  Carlyle's  negative  deliverances  were  due 
to  his  ingrained  and  essential  non-conformity.^  He 
was  by  nature  an  eminently  otherwise-minded  man, 

*  This  article  may  be  found  at  greater  length  in  the  appendix  to 
Prof.  John  Nicol's  admirable  Thomas  Carlyle  of  the  English  Men 
of  Letters  Series,  pp.  255-257. 

»  Prof.  Nicol,  Thomas  Carlyky  p.  71. 


218  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

a  radical,  set  against  the  prevalent  Toryism  of  his 
youth,  who  changed  to  a  worshipper  of  wilful  force 
at  almost  equal  variance  with  the  democracy  of  his 
old  age.  This  type  of  character  is  quickly  discerned, 
and  its  whimsies  pretty  generally  discounted,  by  a 
patient  world,  used  to  a  good  deal  of  chaff  with 
its  wheat,  and  indisposed  to  murmur  if  only  the 
wheat  be  of  pronounced  and  unmistakable  qual- 
ity. Carlyle's  extravagances  misled  few  of  his  dis- 
ciples into  anything  worse  than  a  temporary  imi- 
tation of  his  style.  His  genuine  love  of  truth,  his 
emphasis  upon  the  vital  relation  of  work  to  man- 
hood, his  idea  of  history  as  a  vision  of  judgement, 
and  his  insatiable  longing  for  "  God,  Freedom, 
Immortality  "  strengthened  the  faith  of  multitudes. 
He  exerted  a  deep  and  lasting  influence  upon  the 
religious  thought  of  his  day ;  and  remains  an  out- 
standing witness  to  the  eagerness  with  which  men 
listen  to  the  voice  of  genuine  authority  when  it 
speaks  upon  the  deepest  themes. 

I  should  be  quite  unwilling  to  attempt  any  elab- 
orate justification  of  the  title  of  this  chapter.  Pro- 
fessor Henry  Jones  has  suggested  in  his  recent 
essays  upon  the  "  Working  Faith  of  a  Social  Re- 
former," ^  that  we  are  in  great  danger  of  being  led 
astray  in  debate  upon  sociological  matters  by  our 
use  of  physical  similes  and  figures.  The  attempt  to 
reach  definitions  by  way  of  metaphors  is  no  less 

*  Hihhert  Journal,  vol.  iv. 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  219 

dangerous  throughout  the  whole  realm  of  personal 
relations,  as  we  shall  find  renewed  occasion  to  note 
when  we  approach  the  Great  Twin  Brethren  of  the 
century's  poetry,  Tennyson  and  Browning.  The 
reader  is  not  to  suppose,  therefore,  that  any  elabo- 
rate likeness  is  to  be  traced  here  between  the  pre- 
exilic  prophets  whose  names  introduce  the  chapter 
and  the  masters  of  Victorian  prose  whose  expe- 
rience and  influence  make  up  its  substance. 

Yet  the  Tishbite  elements  in  Carlyle  are  very 
plain  to  see.  His  rude  but  devout  uprearing,  his 
training  in  the  desert  of  poverty  and  doubt,  his  im- 
patience with  the  conventional  forms  of  life  and 
speech,  his  almost  brutal  force  of  utterance  and 
contempt  of  compromise,  fitted  him  in  rare  degree 
to  be  the  spokesman  of  a  certain  type  of  truth  to 
an  age  that  seemed  bent  upon  the  service  of  false 
gods.  The  breath  of  his  nostrils  was  denunciatory, 
and,  like  all  mastery  of  the  dangerous  art  of  curs- 
ing, it  reacted  upon  him,  plunging  him  at  times  into 
such  depths  of  gloom  that  his  most  characteristic 
seat  seems  to  many  to  be  the  throne  of  despair 
beneath  the  juniper.  The  oft  repeated  "Ay  de 
mi "  was  simply  his  translation  into  less  dignified 
terms  of  the  old  "  It  is  enough ;  now,  O  Lord, 
take  away  my  life ;  for  I  am  not  better  than  my 
fathers." 

A  large,  if  not  a  double,  portion  of  this  spirit 
fell  upon  his  great  disciple,  who  yet  seemed  to  the 
world  to  be  a  sunnier  and  more  gracious  character. 


220  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

To  say  that  Ruskin  was  more  conventional  than 
Carlyle  would  be  to  over-shoot  the  mark ;  since  in 
many  ways  he  bade  defiance  all  his  life  long  to  some 
of  society's  most  cherished  bye-laws.  But  he  was 
gently  reared ;  tenderly  sheltered  from  rude  circum- 
stance ;  led  up  to  his  life's  work  by  pleasant  paths, 
and  the  heir  to  a  goodly  material  heritage.  There 
was  a  touch  of  natural  grimness  in  the  elder  prophet 
which  accorded  well  with  the  raiment  of  camel's 
hair,  the  leathern  girdle,  and  the  desert  cry  of  the 
Elijah-John  Baptist  tradition ;  though  he  was  in 
point  of  fact  a  more  habitual  frequenter  of  great 
houses  and  aristocratic  company  than  Ruskin  ever 
became ;  but,  through  his  talk  even  there,  we  dis- 
cern the  northern  hurr  and  the  rude  strength  of  a 
hard-headed  peasant's  speech. 

The  pupil  and  interpreter,  who  popularized  much 
of  his  doctrine  that  might  otherwise  never  have 
gained  the  world's  ear,  was  as  pronouncedly  middle- 
class  in  origin.  Yet,  precisely  as  the  peasant  family 
of  Ecclefechan  showed  a  degree  of  industrial,  ethi- 
cal, and  spiritual  cultivation  which  marked  them 
among  other  households  of  their  neighbourhood,  so 
the  rich  sherry-importer  of  Billiter  Street,  and  his 
wife  ruling  her  household  at  Heme  Hill,  are  to  be 
explicitly  distinguished  from  the  ordinary  Philistine 
type  of  middle-class  family.  The  elder  Ruskin  was 
a  man  of  considerable  natural  refinement,  distinct, 
though  by  no  means  exceptional,  artistic  gifts,  and 
good  education.  Mrs.  Ruskin  represented  the  best 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  221 

tjrpe  of  British  matron,  cast  in  a  rather  large  and 
placid  mould,  —  the  very  personification  of  good 
sense,  firm  household  authority,  and  devout  religious 
conviction.  If  under  these  circumstances  their  son 
fell  heir  to  Carlyle's  mission,  it  was  at  least  with 
some  of  the  differences  which  gentler  nurture,  ample 
opportunities  for  travel,  a  keen  though  wilful  aes- 
thetic sense,  and  the  experience  of  a  gentleman  com- 
moner of  Christ  Church  naturally  tended  to  pro- 
duce. The  later  prophet  might  well  seem  therefore 
to  be  the  more  gracious  in  the  general  tenor  of 
his  message ;  yet  like  Ehsha  he  was  subject  to  gusts 
of  wintry  anger,  under  the  stress  of  which  he  could 
curse  those  who  dared  to  mock  him  with  all  his 
master's  unction. 

In  the  case  of  both,  religion  may  be  said  to  have 
entered  into  the  very  substance  of  their  pre-natal 
life.  Like  Hannah  of  old,  Euskin's  mother  dedi- 
cated her  son  to  the  service  of  religion  by  antici- 
pation ;  and  both  parents  long  cherished  the  hope 
that  he  would  take  orders  —  and  incidentally  office 
—  in  the  Church  of  Engfland.  As  a  child  Ruskin 
seems  to  have  looked  upon  this  as  a  sufficiently 
natural  and  welcome  prospect.  He  has  himself  told 
the  story  of  a  childish  sermon  in  the  drawing  room 
at  home  whose  burden  was,  "  People,  be  good." 
Unexceptionable  doctrine,  to  be  sure,  and  worthy  of 
all  acceptation,  though  the  picture  of  the  religiously 
precocious  child  is  a  little  painful,  and  the  taste 
which  could  give  such  priggishness  permanence  is 


222  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

characteristically  dubious.  Yet  it  would  be  the 
greatest  of  mistakes  to  suppose  that  Ruskin's  pro- 
nouncedly religious  home  training  was  mawkish  or 
sentimental.  The  evangelical  faith  of  his  parents, 
especially  of  his  mother,  had  far  too  much  twist  in 
its  fibre  to  tolerate  flabbiness  or  sentimentality.  The 
boy  was  taught  his  Bible  as  many  a  contemporary 
was  taught  his  Latin  grammar,  verbatim  et  litera^ 
tint,  with  less  regard  to  his  immediate  ability  to 
grasp  its  significance  than  to  his  future  acquaintr 
ance  with  the  text  in  a  day  when  wider  experience 
of  life  might  clothe  manner  and  matter  both  with 
meaning.  So  his  mother,  careful  to  the  verge  of 
prudishness  though  she  seemed  in  some  things,  took 
him  squarely  through  both  Testaments,  exercising 
a  wise  choice  as  to  the  chapters  to  be  memorized, 
but  blinking  not  a  syllable,  as  it  would  seem,  of  the 
less  lovely  or  profitable  portions  of  the  narratives. 
Hard  names  and  doubtful  actions  were  all  manfully 
read  out,  until  the  whole  book  became  wellnigh  as 
familiar  as  a  household  word. 

His  own  testimony  to  the  worth  of  this  experience 
is  memorable. 

"  Her  unquestioning  evangelical  faith  in  the 
literal  truth  of  the  Bible  placed  me,  as  soon  as  I 
could  conceive  or  think,  in  the  presence  of  an 
unseen  world;  and  set  my  active  analytic  power 
early  to  work  on  the  questions  of  conscience,  free- 
will, and  responsibility,  which  are  easily  determined 
in  days  of  innocence  ;  but  are  approached  too  often 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  223 

with  prejudice,  and  always  with  disadvantage,  after 
men  become  stupefied  by  the  opinions,  or  tainted 
by  the  sins,  of  the  outer  world :  while  the  gloom 
and  even  terror  with  which  the  restrictions  of  the 
Sunday,  and  the  doctrines  of  the  '  Pilgrim's  Pro- 
gress,' the  '  Holy  War,'  and  Quarles's  '  Emblems ' 
oppressed  the  seventh  part  of  my  time,  was  useful 
to  me  as  the  only  form  of  vexation  which  I  was 
called  on  to  endure ;  and  redeemed  by  the  other- 
wise uninterrupted  cheerfulness  and  tranquillity  of 
a  household  wherein  the  common  ways  were  all  of 
pleasantness,  and  its  single  and  strait  path,  of  per- 
fect peace."  ^ 

Both  Carlyle  and  Ruskin  must  have  become  emi- 
nent among  their  fellows  under  almost  any  con- 
ceivable circumstances  of  training.  It  seems  safe  to 
aver,  however,  that  neither  would  have  developed 
the  great  literary  and  ethical  power  that  each  finally 
exerted  without  this  early  familiarity  with  Scripture 
thought  and  language.  We  may  go  further  and  as- 
cribe no  small  portion  of  their  influence  to  the  evan- 
gelical faith  in  which  both  were  reared  and  some- 
thing of  whose  essence  remained  with  them,  even 
in  their  most  heterodox  days.  One  of  the  essen- 
tial features  of  evangelical  Protestantism  has  been 
its  insistence  upon  the  value  of  a  faith  which  should 
be  at  once  positive,  individual,  strenuous,  and  un- 
compromisingly confessed.  Frequently  enough  this 
has  bred  dogmatic  and  unlovely  characters ;  but  it 
has  rarely  failed  to  produce  effective  men.  Of  all 

1  PrcBterita,  vol.  i,  chap.  7. 


224  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

its  children  none  had  a  clearer  claim  to  legitimacy 
than  Carlyle  and  Ruskin.  Both  disappointed  their 
parents  by  failing  to  enter  the  formal  ministry  of  the 
Church ;  though  Carlyle,  as  a  student  of  divinity, 
once  pronounced  a  sermon  in  college,  and  Ruskin, 
as  has  been  said,  exercised  his  infant  gifts  in  the 
nursery.  Yet  both  came  to  be  known  as  preachers 
to  a  greater  audience  than  their  mothers'  wildest 
dreams  had  pictured  for  them.  Both  kept  a  great 
deal  of  the  manner  and  much  of  the  essence  of  the 
religious  faith  in  which  they  had  been  trained.  The 
most  popular  works  of  both  breathed  an  ardent 
Protestantism ;  and  both,  Carlyle  certainly,  seem  to 
have  retained  an  evangelical  distaste  for  the  con- 
fessed Unitarians ;  ^  though  they  themselves  might 
be  adjudged  to  be  Unitarians  by  a  stickler  for  theo- 
logical definition. 

The  religious  burden  of  both  was  the  old  evan- 
gelical watchword,  "By  faith  ye  are  saved" ;  and 
no  less  strenuously  did  they  voice  its  complement, 
"Faith  without  works  is  dead."  Both  were  emi- 
nently non-conformist  in  a  general  rather  than  a 
sectarian  sense,  in  so  far  as  they  discovered  the 
seat  of  religion  in  the  personal  relation  of  the  in- 
dividual to  God  and  to  his  fellows,  rather  than  in 
any  tradition  or  institution.  Both  remained  rela- 

1  The  reader  will  recall  the  letter  in  which  Carlyle  confesses  to 
Emerson  the  fact  that  he  was  the  only  Unitarian  whom  he  could 
thoroughly  like ;  while  his  dislike  of  Strauss  and  Renan  was  sincere 
and  pronounced.  Nicol,  Thomas  Carlyle,  p.  225. 


ELUAH  AND  ELISHA  225 

tively  indifferent  to  the  organized  Church  with  her 
worship,  sacraments,  system  of  instruction,  and 
social  helpfulness ;  yet  this  was  at  least  partly  be- 
cause of  their  recognition  of  the  scope  and  range 
of  personality.  "  The  earthly  vesture  of  spiritual 
forces " ;  such  was  the  definition  of  man  which 
underlay  Ruskin's  thought,  as  it  has  already  been 
shown  to  have  animated  Carlyle's.  The  latter  illus- 
trated it  in  the  realms  of  history,  politics,  and  phi- 
losophy. Ruskin  carried  it  on  into  the  criticism 
of  art,  which  in  his  hands  became  of  necessity  the 
criticism  of  life ;  and  into  a  romantic  assault  upon 
the  current  political  economy.  Utterly  quixotic  as 
this  last  adventure  must  have  seemed  to  the  Eng- 
land of  Cobden  and  the  Manchester  School ;  dan- 
gerous as  the  orthodox  economists  may  have  thought 
it,  in  spite  of  its  quixotism,  so  eloquent  was  the 
form  of  its  strange  gospel ;  vague  and  chimerical 
as  many  of  its  specific  recommendations  undoubt- 
edly were ;  the  last  half-century  has  gone  far  to 
justify  Ruskin's  entrance  upon  this  field.  Paladin 
born  out  of  due  time  as  he  was,  and  all  too  ready 
to  set  his  lance  in  rest  against  sheep  and  wind- 
mills, he  yet  won  his  way  to  a  place  of  unques- 
tioned eminence  among  the  leaders  of  his  century 
because  of  his  insistence  upon  the  relationship  be- 
tween art  and  life,  political  economy  and  ethics, 
the  common  weal  and  the  welfare  of  each  indi- 
vidual worker.  Like  his  great  contemporary,  Lord 
Shaftesbury,  he  employed  a  definition  of  manhood 


226  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

which  included  and  took  account  o£  the  downmost 
man.  That  both  framed  some  of  their  definitions 
rather  blunderingly  is  not  to  the  point.  The  office 
of  the  preacher  is  often  less  to  tell  his  hearers  what 
to  do,  than  to  arouse  them  to  the  necessity  of 
doing  something,  and  to  the  inquiry  what  it  shall 
be.  When  society  at  large  puts  this  question  men 
are  so  constituted  in  their  likeness  and  relation  to 
God  that  an  answer  is  never  long  delayed. 

Ruskin's  preaching  was  of  precisely  this  convict- 
ing and  arousing  sort :  grotesque,  exaggerated, 
emotional,  oftentimes  beyond  what  was  seemly,  like 
much  evangelistic  arraignment  and  exhortation ; 
but  wonderfully  fitted  to  its  purpose  of  shattering 
prosperous  self-complacency,  waking  a  sluggish 
social  conscience,  and  inciting  a  hunger  and  thirst 
after  truer  economic  righteousness.  It  has  been 
commonly  taken  for  granted  that  his  doctrine 
lacked  continuity  and  system ;  and  the  extraordi- 
nary nimbleness  of  his  wit,  together  with  an  ana- 
lytic faculty  as  overworked  as  it  was  over-developed, 
has  seemed  to  justify  the  belief.  He  was  forever 
turning  aside  at  the  appeal  of  a  new  interest, 
illuminated  as  it  always  was  by  his  sanguine  im- 
agination. Thus  the  third  and  fourth  volumes  of 
"  Modern  Painters  "  were  so  long  postponed  to  the 
"  Seven  Lamps  of  Architecture,"  the  "  Stones  of 
Venice,"  and  the  "  Lectures  on  Architecture  and 
Painting,"  that  the  work  as  a  whole  is  thrown  out 
of  joint  by  the  ten-year  interval ;  while  the  further 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  227 

delay  of  four  years  before  the  final  volumes  ap- 
peared, together  with  the  diversion  of  Raskin's  in- 
terest in  the  meantime  to  political  economy,  served 
to  heighten  the  sense  of  incongruity.  Indeed  the 
casual  reader  is  tempted  to  say  that  most  of  his 
pilgrimage  was  a  more  or  less  enthusiastic  flitting 
to  and  fro  in  Bye-path  Meadow. 

Yet  the  student  who  has  learned  Ruskin's  lan- 
guage and  caught  a  glimpse  of  the  manner  in  which 
his  heart,  mind,  and  will  coordinated  their  activi- 
ties, will  not  be  deceived.  Bye-path  Meadow  un- 
questionably had  its  pleasant  way  with  him  at 
times,  and  led  him  into  its  characteristic  difficulties. 
But  it  never  succeeded  in  changing  the  general 
direction  of  his  march,  interrupting  the  continuity 
of  his  humane  interests,  or  making  him  forget  the 
guiding  principles  of  his  faith. 

With  the  doctrine  of  Personality,  or  of  the  place 
and  power  of  the  Person,  so  forcefully,  though 
often  so  perversely  expounded  by  Carlyle  in  his 
"  Heroes  and  Hero-Worship,"  "  Cromwell,"  and 
"  Frederick,"  Ruskin  found  himself  in  hearty  ac- 
cord. But  he  approached  it  at  a  different  angle  and 
emphasized  a  different  aspect  of  it.  Carlyle's  inter- 
est centred  in  the  Leader,  or  King,  of  men  ;  cen- 
tred so  completely  there,  indeed,  as  to  confound 
his  etymological  instinct  and  lead  him  to  worse 
than  dubious  sources  for  the  derivation  of  some  of 
his  words.  Ruskin  was  quite  as  devout  a  worshipper 
of  order,  though  a  less  subservient  admirer  of  force. 


228  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

He  proclaimed  his  Toryism  from  the  housetops. 
But  ^  in  the  last  analysis '  (as  the  current  phrase 
goes),  his  interest  in  the  social  order  centred  in  the 
Person  as  a  worker  and  therefore  a  creator,  whether 
poet  or  artisan.  The  famous  chapter  on  the  "  Na- 
ture of  Gothic"  in  Volume  II  of  the  "Stones  of 
Venice,"  with  its  memorable  emphasis  upon  the 
worth  of  a  right  attitude  on  the  part  of  the  worker 
toward  his  work,  sets  this  forth.  The  strain  recurs 
in  Volume  III  of  "Modern  Painters,"  where  great- 
ness of  style,  and  false  and  true  ideals,  are  dis- 
cussed quite  as  really  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
religious  and  ethical  teacher  as  from  that  of  the 
art  critic. 

Indeed  the  third  chapter  of  this  volume  might 
with  perfect  fitness  be  incorporated  into  the  course 
in  homiletics  in  any  school  of  the  prophets.  Bus- 
kin makes  true  greatness  of  style  in  art  —  and  the 
application  is  general  to  all  artistic  composition, 
whether  in  word,  line,  or  colour — to  consist  in 
the  first  place  in  the  choice  of  noble  subjects ;  that 
is  in  the  habitual  selection  "  of  subjects  which  in- 
volve wide  interests  and  profound  passions,  as  op- 
posed to  those  which  involve  narrow  interests  and 
slight  passions."  Two  pitfalls  lurk,  however,  in  the 
path  of  him  who  would  develop  a  noble  subject  — 
both  dug  by  vanity.  He  will  be  tempted  on  the 
one  hand  to  supersede  expression  by  an  attempt  at 
technical  excellence  which  will  lead  him,  if  he  be  a 
preacher,  let  us  say,  into  the  reading  of  admirably 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  229 

finished  but  painfully  inefficient  essays  ;  or  in  his 
zeal  for  effective  expression  he  may  on  the  other 
do  such  despite  to  the  technique  of  his  art  as  to 
smother  his  theme  and  nauseate  his  hearers  by  a 
flood  of  unregulated  and  sentimental  passion.  In 
the  second  place,  this  art  consists  in  a  love  of 
beauty,  which  must,  however,  be  true  in  its  purpose 
to  represent  things  as  they  are,  never  arbitrarily 
omitting  the  ugly,  but  keeping  it  in  subjection  to 
the  pure  and  lovely.  "  Great  art  dwells  on  all  that 
is  beautiful ;  but  false  art  omits  or  changes  all  that 
is  ugly."  The  third  essential  to  him  who  would  be 
a  great  artist  is  sincerity ;  an  essential  so  obvious, 
whatever  the  medium  of  the  art  may  be,  as  to  make 
comment  needless.  Not  only,  however,  must  the 
choice  of  noble  themes  be  sincere,  but  since  all 
truth  cannot  be  presented,  so  varied  and  multifa- 
rious is  it,  the  artist  must  be  honest  in  his  choice 
between  what  can  be  taken  and  what  must  be  left. 
"  The  inferior  artist  chooses  unimportant  and  scat- 
tered truths  ;  the  great  artist  chooses  the  most 
necessary  first  and  afterwards  the  most  consistent 
with  these,  so  as  to  obtain  the  greatest  possible 
and  most  harmonious  sum'^  Finally,  great  art  must 
always  be  inventive,  and  like  poetry  in  this  respect, 
that  it  is  never  content  with  bald  narrative,  or  a 
mere  copy  of  external  nature,  or  a  didactic  utter- 
ance of  the  truth,  to  be  accepted  or  rejected  at  the 
onlooker's  whim ;  all  its  material  is  made  the  art- 
ist's own,  passes  into  the  alembic  of  his  personal- 


230  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ity,  and  after  being  transfused  by  his  imagination, 
reappears  in  living  forms  calculated  to  arouse  true 
emotion  and  to  compel  acceptance.  Thus  in  a  pic- 
ture the  painted  forms  are  transfigured  into  men 
and  women  of  like  passions  with  ourselves ;  and  no 
less  in  a  sermon,  the  truth  which  seemed  external 
and  remote  yesterday,  to-day  searches  the  heart, 
compels  the  will,  and  is  transformed  into  good- 
ness. 

I  have  cited  this  chapter  simply  to  indicate  how 
applicable  Ruskin's  criticism  of  art  is  to  the  guid- 
ance of  the  writer,  teacher,  or  preacher;  the  fact 
being  that  he  recognizes  the  fundamental  identity 
of  principle  underlying  all  worthy  human  activi- 
ties, uniting  them  to  one  another,  and  joining  all 
to  the  creative  processes  of  God. 

This  constitutes  the  principle  of  unity  and  cohe- 
rence which  runs  through  all  his  work.  The  work 
itself  often  seems  fragmentary;  the  active  mind 
was  so  capable  of  vagaries  and  the  ebullient  im- 
agination was  so  liable  to  fly  off  for  the  time  at 
new  tangents;  yet  the  man  himself  remained  true 
to  his  central  doctrines  of  the  worth  of  the  Person ; 
of  the  absolute  necessity  of  the  worker's  identifi- 
cation of  self  with  his  work  before  that  work  could 
become  true ;  as  well  as  the  equal  necessity  under 
which  society  rested  of  respecting  this  Person, 
whether  king  or  peasant,  and  assuring  to  him  his 
full  share  of  privilege,  before  the  chief  human  art 
— that  of  living  together — could  ever  be  developed 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  231 

to  its  full  capacity.  I  have  already  shown  how  this 
doctrine  is  suggested  in  the  "Stones  of  Venice" 
and  the  mid-volumes  of  "Modern  Painters."  Be- 
fore he  was  thirty,  he  tells  us  in  "  Praeterita,"  ^  the 
problem  of  the  Andalusian  peasantry,  whose  labours 
produced  the  sherry  so  necessary  and  profitable  to 
his  father's  business,  and  the  nearer  puzzle  pre- 
sented by  the  contrast  between  his  own  fortunate 
lot  and  that  of  his  cousins  in  Perth  and  Croydon, 
had  become  matters  first  of  interest  and  then  of 
concern  to  him.  Under  the  influence  of  the  great 
question  thus  presented,  the  joyous  and  romantic 
grace  of  his  earlier  writings  lost  something  of  its 
bloom;  but  the  prophetic  note  deepened  until 
Ruskin's  voice  became,  if  not  the  most  authorita- 
tive, at  least  one  of  the  most  haunting  and  con- 
victing of  his  day.  The  message  which  he  uttered 
in  "Unto  this  Last,"  and  "Munera  Pulveris"  was 
like  a  reiteration  of  the  prophecy  of  Amos  done 
into  latter-day  English.  The  former  began  its 
appearance  in  the  "Cornhill"  Magazine,  under 
Thackeray's  editorship,  in  1860;  but  the  outcry 
against  it  was  so  general  that  the  publication  was 
discontinued.  Almost  precisely  the  same  fate  befell 
the  latter,  which  "Eraser's,"  then  edited  by  Eroude, 
began  to  print  in  1862,  but  was  forced  to  discon- 
tinue in  like  manner. 

It  was  at   this   juncture  that   he  seems  unre- 
servedly to  have  assumed  the  prophet's  mantle  and 

» Vol.  ii,  chap.  9. 


232  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

resigned  himself  to  the  prophet's  fate.  As  Mr. 
Mackail  has  put  it:  "Now  the  task  before  him 
was  to  break  down  his  own  popularity,  to  be  re- 
garded by  the  world  with  a  mixture  of  pity  and 
contempt,  to  see  even  his  friends  fail  him  and  fall 
away  from  him."  It  was  hard  for  the  reading  pub- 
lic of  the  early  sixties  to  see  any  natural  bond 
of  continuity  relating  the  political  and  religious 
heresy  of  the  economist  to  the  highly  improving 
eloquence  of  the  evangelical  champion  of  Turner. 
Time  was  needed  before  his  central  doctrine  of  the 
preeminence  of  the  Person  should  be  clearly  dis- 
cerned by  the  public  and  bring  to  light  such  har- 
mony as  really  existed  between  Ruskin's  earlier 
and  later  work.  Meanwhile  it  must  be  remembered 
that  it  was  but  imperfectly  discerned  by  the  prophet 
himself.  Both  Ruskin  and  Carlyle  caught  glimpses 
of  it  which  were  vivid  and  compelling  enough  to 
give  direction  and  distinction  to  their  work;  but 
neither  enjoyed  the  clear  and  constant  vision. 
Both  believed  in  God ;  but  to  the  end  both  seemed 
to  think  of  the  Divine  Power  and  Presence  as 
manifested  by  interference  with  the  natural  order 
rather  than  as  resident  in  it  and  working  through 
it.  So  much  of  the  truth  as  Ruskin  saw,  inspired 
— and  teased  him.  Hence  it  happened  that  — 

"  Stimulating  and  fascinating  beyond  all  writers 
of  his  generation  in  detached  utterances,  he  was 
less  like  a  builder  than  a  sower  scattering  seed  to 
right  and  left  with  careless  hand.  Some  of  his  seed 


ELIJAH  AND  ELISHA  233 

fell  on  the  wayside,  some  among  thorns,  much  in 
shallow  soil.  What  fell  on  good  ground  has  pro- 
foundly influenced  the  movement  of  the  world  for 
the  last  half -century." 

Again  the  words  are  Mr.  Mackail's,  and  upon  the 
whole  we  may  give  hearty  assent  to  them. 

Ruskin's  strength  and  weakness  have  both  con- 
tributed in  their  several  degrees  to  confirm  his  hold 
upon  the  last  two  generations.  He  has  always  the 
manner  of  a  sincere  man,  —  sincere  no  less  in  his 
prejudices  and  whims  than  in  his  great  convictions. 
There  is  a  frankness  about  his  very  irritabihty  that 
is  engaging,  as  when  for  instance  he  confesses  that 
on  one  occasion,  as  he  approached  the  Alps,  the  long- 
expected  rapture  of  his  first  glimpse  of  their  snows 
was  spoiled  by  the  fact  that  at  the  last  halting-place 
his  man  had  neglected  to  provide  butter  for  the 
bread.  The  facts  are  set  down  with  a  whimsical 
enjoyment  of  their  incongruity,  which  the  reader 
shares.  Perfectly  temperate  and  even  abstemious 
though  he  was,  he  repeatedly  makes  epistolary  cap- 
ital of  the  temptations  lying  in  wait  for  a  traveller's 
appetite.  The  following  passage  from  a  rhymed  let- 
ter to  Mrs.  Severn  illustrates  this,  and  shows  at  the 
same  time  his  extraordinary  facility  in  verse-making. 
The  reader  may  need  to  be  reminded  that  his  father's 
crest  was  a  boar's  head,  and  that  Ruskin,  who  had 
grave  doubts  about  the  vaHdity  of  the  family  coat- 
of-arms,  used  sometimes  to  refer  to  himself  on  dys- 
peptic occasions  as  "  little  pigs." 


234  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

If  little  pigs  —  when  evening  dapples, 
With  fading  clouds,  her  autumn  sky  — 
Set  out  in  search  of  Norman  chapels, 
And  find,  instead,  where  cliffs  are  high, 
Half  way  from  Amiens  to  Etaples, 
A  castle,  full  of  pears  and  apples, 
On  donjon  floors  laid  out  to  dry,  — 
Green  jargonelles  and  apples  tenny,  — 
And  finds  their  price  is  five  a  penny, 
If  little  pigs  then  buy  too  many. 
Spare  to  those  little  pigs  a  sigh.  ^ 

It  is  odd  that  his  sense  of  humour,  which  was  so 
keen  and  wholesome,  should  not  oftener  have  come 
to  his  aid  when  tempted,  as  he  frequently  was,  to  j  ump 
from  uncertain  premisses  to  dogmatic  conclusions. 
There  was  a  mischievous  little  boy  upon  W ailing- 
ford  Bridge  whose  intentness  of  regard,  fastened 
as  it  seemed  to  be  upon  the  parapet,  convinced  the 
passing  Ruskin  that  here  was  a  young  naturalist 
whose  interest  in  stone  or  insect  gave  token  of  a 
better  day  for  British  youth.  Suddenly  the  child 
darted  across  the  roadway  and  assumed  the  same  at- 
titude of  intense  watchfulness  upon  the  other  side 
—  when  it  became  evident  that  his  purpose  was,  not 
merely  to  spit  upon  a  laden  pleasure-boat  passing 
beneath,  but  with  impish  zeal  to  spit  upon  it  twice. 
The  disillusionment  was  complete  enough  to  have 

^  Prceteritaf  vol.  ii,  chap.  8,  p.  294.  Even  more  succinct  is  the 
apothegm:  — 

When  little  pigs  have  muffins  hot 
And  take  three  quarters  for  their  lot, 
Then  little  pigs  —  had  better  not. 


ELIJAH  AND   ELISHA  235 

justified  an  inward  chuckle  even  while  it  necessitated 
an  outward  rebuke.  But  to  Ruskin  it  seemed  to  break 
the  seal  of  a  prophetic  scroll  upon  which  was  written 
the  doom  of  a  people  whose  youth  were  thus  lost  to 
all  sense  of  gentleness  and  reverence.  "  Dear  but 
peppery  Mr.  Ruskin,"  began  some  unknown  corre- 
spondent one  morning,  when  the  letters  were  brought 
in  at  Brantwood.  It  was  impertinent,  as  unknown 
correspondents  are  wont  to  be,  but  it  summed  up 
succinctly  the  judgement  of  his  day  —  especially  its 
feminine  judgement  —  upon  a  teacher  who  could  be 
equally  zealous  in  great  and  little  matters,  but  who 
was  always  true-hearted,  pitiful,  and  devout.  He  has 
proved  to  be  one  of  the  most  effective  preachers  of 
his  generation  ;  singularly  indebted  to  religion  for 
the  character  of  his  parents,  for  his  training  at  home, 
and  for  his  command  of  a  highly  ornate  but  still 
honestly  eloquent  style,  formed  as  it  was,  partly  with 
set  purpose  upon  that  of  the  judicious  Hooker,  and 
yet  more  largely  and  naturally  upon  the  Bible  and 
the  language  of  devotion  which  has  sprung  from 
it.  It  is  under  the  forms  of  religion  that  we  most 
naturally  describe  his  experience  of  acceptance,  re- 
jection and  re-acceptance  as  a  prophet.  And  it  is  to 
terms  of  essential  Christianity  that  we  must  have  re- 
course in  order  to  express  the  abiding  elements  in 
his  message. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE    MASTERS    OF   FICTION.    I 

The  title  of  this  chapter  suggests  one  of  the  most 
difficult  questions  which  I  shall  have  to  face.  It  is 
comparatively  easy  to  appraise  the  significance  of 
religion  to  the  man  who  boldly  writes  about  it, 
even  when,  as  often  happens,  we  are  forced  to  go 
behind  his  words.  The  poet,  for  instance,  whose 
art  compels  him,  unless  he  be  a  very  minor  poet 
indeed,  to  scale  the  heights  of  aspiration  and  to 
sound  the  depths  of  experience,  usually  states  the 
case  with  relative  plainness  even  when  its  problems 
are  not  easy  of  solution.  The  modern  novelist  of 
the  ^ psychological' school,  whose  too  often  meagre 
and  exiguous,  even  though  painfully  elaborated,  art 
occupies  itself  with  some  acute  crisis  in  life's  fever, 
is  given  to  such  definite  pronouncement  upon  re- 
ligion as  to  obviate  the  danger  of  serious  mistake 
concerning  his  view  of  it  or  its  influence  upon  him. 
But  the  great  names  in  nineteenth-century  fiction, 
until  we  reach  that  of  George  Eliot,  decline  to  be 
thus  explicit.  What  religion  meant  to  them,  what 
they  meant  by  it,  and  what  place  they  assigned 
to  it  in  the  life  which  their  novels  portrayed,  are 
questions  whose  answers  must  be  distilled  rather 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  237 

than  extracted  bodily  from  their  work.  This  neces- 
sity lays  the  writer  upon  such  a  theme  as  mine 
open  both  to  temptation  and  to  misunderstanding. 
The  temptation  is  to  express  by  violence  from  their 
"writings  opinions  which  he  has  himself  introduced 
by  subtilty ;  while  even  if  he  be  wholly  honest  in 
his  plan  of  treatment,  those  whose  prejudices  are 
enlisted  for  or  against  a  given  author  may,  upon 
that  very  ground,  accuse  him  of  indifference  or 
partiality. 

Hence  it  becomes  necessary  at  this  juncture  to 
remind  the  reader  of  the  religious  significance  im- 
plied in  the  very  form  of  the  novel.  The  novel  is 
a  picture  of  life.  Unlike  history,  which — at  least 
until  recently  —  concerned  itself  primarily  with 
annals  and  the  ascertainment  of  events  recognized 
to  be  passed  and  gone,  the  novel  pictures  life  in 
progress,  with  its  expectations,  passions,  and  ideals. 
History  deals  with  communities,  or  with  leaders  of 
men  in  their  representative  capacities.  The  novel 
puts  us  in  touch  with  individuals,  and,  if  it  be  a 
great  novel,  reveals  ^characters' — which  is  but 
another  way  of  saying  that  it  introduces  us  to  the 
soul  as  an  ultimate  subject  of  experience.  In  the 
Introduction  I  undertook  to  show  that  all  experi- 
ences of  the  soul  are  germane  to  religion.  They 
are  not  less  significant  to  the  writer  of  genuinely 
human  tales.  The  novelist  deals  with  the  souls  of 
men  under  the  aspect  of  their  earthly  pilgrimage 
of   three-score   years   and   ten.    Religion   regards 


-238  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

them  sub  specie  ceternitatis.  It  follows  that  the 
range  of  fiction  is  legitimately  wider  than  that  of 
any  critical  school  or  sect.  Nothing  could  well  be 
more  parochial  than  the  claims  of  the  so-called 
^  realists '  to  a  monopoly  of  the  art.  The  genuinely 
catholic  critic  will  rejoice  in  Jane  Austen's  "  two 
inches  square  of  ivory";  but  at  the  same  time  he 
will  remember  that  not  all  painting  can  be  done  in 
miniature,  and  that  a  microscope  is  by  no  means 
an  adequate  instrument  for  observation  of  the  sun. 
In  the  development  of  life  the  adventures  of  the 
imagination  play  as  real  a  part  as  love  and  hun- 
ger; the  thing  striven  for  and  missed  may  conceiv- 
ably enter  more  largely  into  experience  than  the 
thing  attained. 

What  I  aspired  to  be, 

And  was  not,  comforts  me. 

The  romantic  element,  which  feeds  gratefully  upon 
the  adventures  of  others  and  aspires  to  adventures 
of  its  own,  is  fundamental;  and  the  ^realist'  who 
ignores  or  cavils  at  it  does  so  at  grievous  peril  to 
his  own  artistic  integrity. 

It  follows  further  that,  just  as  every  field  of 
real  life  has  treasure  in  it  for  the  student  of  reli- 
gion, and  sometimes  the  treasure  under  barren 
surfaces  proves  richest,  so  all  honest  fiction  —  by 
which  I  mean  every  sincere  attempt  to  portray 
life,  whether  commonplace  or  extraordinary,  as  dis- 
tinguished from  that  writing  which  aims  at  mere 
sensational  effect — bears  its  message  to  him;  and 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  239 

again,  the  message  that  seems  to  concern  itself 
least  explicitly  with  religion  is  frequently  of  more 
religious  significance  than  the  word  of  the  man 
who  is  always  crying,  "Lord!  Lord!" 

One  thing  more  needs  to  be  clearly  understood  in 
this  connection.  By  a  general  consensus  of  uncritical 
opinion  it  seems  to  have  been  taken  for  granted  that, 
while  tragedy  may  be  allowed  some  legitimate  claim 
to  a  place  in  the  temple  of  faith,  comedy,  if  not  as- 
signed to  the  outer  darkness,  can  only  stand  humbly 
in  a  distant  court  of  the  Gentiles.  Pathos  is  sup- 
posed to  be  naturally  pious ;  humour  is  thought  to 
be  of  the  world  and  must  be  converted.  At  the  risk 
of  seeming  dogmatic,  I  steadfastly  maintain  that  no 
heresy  ever  better  deserved  bell,  book,  and  candle. 
For  consider  how  deep  into  the  heart  of  imbelief  it 
inveigles  the  unwary.  Grant  its  premisses  and  athe- 
ism is  assured. 

Humour  I  take  to  be  a  quick  sense  of  life's  lesser 
incongruities.  They  appear  in  every  phase  of  expe- 
rience,—  in  the  soul's  aspiration  and  the  fancy's 
dream,  as  well  as  in  the  day's  work.  The  practical 
joker,  who  is  rarely  a  person  of  genuine  humour, 
being  just  able  to  discern  the  fact  that  humour  and 
incongruity  are  related,  goes  about  to  drag  in  his 
*  accidents '  with  cart-ropes,  or  lays  traps  to  catch 
mirth  unawares.  He  fails  because  his  artificial  mis- 
haps are  gross  and  cruel.  Smiles  are  too  wary  to  be 
caught  with  guile,  though  now  and  then  a  lumber- 
ing and  small-witted  laugh  may  be  trapped.  Purpose- 


240  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ful  indignities  cannot  from  their  very  nature  be 
genuinely  humourous,  though  the  casually  undigni- 
fied may  be  funny  enough  in  a  rather  poor  and  tem- 
porary way. 

True  humour,  then,  —  whereby  I  mean  that  which 
not  only  tickles  the  fancy's  palate  to  quiet  mirth,  but 
also  leaves  so  sweet  a  taste  as  to  make  rumination 
pleasant, — must  depend  for  its  wholesomeness  upon 
faith.  A  mischance  or  contradiction,  to  seem  funny, 
must  of  necessity  be  casual;  the  moment  that  it 
threatens  to  become  normal  or  permanent,  mirth 
changes  to  a  seriousness  of  more  than  common  grav- 
ity. The  sudden  eclipse  of  recently  installed  electric 
lights  in  a  public  building,  just  as  a  speaker  had 
completed  a  period  in  which  their  wonder  and  con- 
venience was  set  forth,  emphasized  as  it  all  was  by 
the  dim  progress  of  a  solitary  lamp  toward  the  plat- 
form in  order  that  the  meeting  might  proceed,  had 
its  distinctly  humourous  side  which  the  audience  ap- 
preciated. But  their  real  enjoyment  depended  upon 
confidence  that  the  interruption  was  temporary; 
that  the  system  was  fairly  and  adequately  installed  ; 
and  that  it  would  go  on  to  do  its  work  again  after 
a  little.  Had  the  mishap  signified  a  permanent  ces- 
sation of  service,  a  dishonest  or  careless  installation 
of  apparatus,  or  even  a  foolish  trick,  the  humour  of 
the  thing  must  have  been  correspondingly  dimin- 
ished until  it  vanished  or  gave  place  to  concern  and 
indignation.  It  is  true  that  the  honestly  mirthful  man, 
whose  appreciation  of  life's  lesser  incongruities  gives 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  241 

variety  to  his  experience  and  lightness  to  his  touch, 
is  not  infrequently  subject  to  attacks  of  depression 
and  gloom.  His  faith  is  equal  to  the  lesser  contra- 
dictions ;  but  the  keen  sense  of  the  unexpected  which 
merely  serves  as  sauce  to  his  usual  equanimity,  re- 
veals no  less  the  great  and  baf&ing  problems  of  life 
with  a  clearness  which  sometimes  throws  faith  into 
temporary  shadow.  Then,  when  for  the  moment  he 
doubts  the  integrity  of  the  general  scheme  of  things, 
not  only  is  laughter  stricken  dumb,  but  —  what  can 
far  less  be  spared  —  the  quiet  smile  of  a  soul  at 
peace  with  God  and  man  fades  out,  and,  for  at  least 
a  little,  a  horror  of  great  darkness  threatens.  With- 
out faith  a  man  may  conceivably  be  a  wit ;  he  may, 
if  he  have  great  intellectual  endowments,  become  a 
master  of  satire  ;  but  honest  humour  grows  best  in 
the  soil  of  faith,  hope,  and  love.  Mr.  Shorthouse 
once  elaborated  the  thesis  that  it  is  of  the  nature  and 
family  of  pathos.^  He  pushed  his  claim  too  far; 
but  it  is  and  must  always  be  true  that  the  heart  most 
keenly  alive  to  the  humour  in  this  oddly  compounded 
life  of  ours  will  never  be  blind  or  indifferent  to  the 
tears  of  things. 

Of  course  humour  is  a  comprehensive  term,  and 
not  all  humourous  minds  are  equally  catholic.  The 
enjoyment  of  farce  depends  so  much  upon  tempera- 
ment that  now  and  then  a  man  who  is  quickly  re- 
sponsive to  those  rays  in  the  spectrum  of  humour 

^  In  MacmiUan's  Magazine^  vol.  xlvii,  p.  363.    Cf .  R.  H.  Hutton, 
Brief  Literary  CriticismSy  p.  69. 


242  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

which  reach  up  toward  the  actinic  violet  of  wit  is 
relatively  insensitive  to  the  broader  effects  in  the 
region  of  red ;  and  it  is  always  to  be  remembered 
that,  just  as  humour  may  on  the  one  hand  vanish 
as  wit  develops  into  malevolent  satire,  so  upon  the 
other  it  may  degenerate  through  farce  into  mere 
grotesquerie^  in  which,  as  Ruskin  once  showed, 
there  is  always  at  least  a  suggestion  of  something 
evil ;  very  much  as  pathos  may  harden  on  this  side 
into  bitterness  and  cynicism,  or  degenerate  upon  that 
into  flabby  and  mawkish  sentimentality.  Within  his 
limits,  however,  — and  they  are  very  wide  ones,  — 
the  true  humourist  strengthens  our  confidence  in  a 
rational  world  by  showing  the  incongruities  of  expe- 
rience for  what  they  are  —  ripples  upon  the  surface 
of  life's  tide.  In  so  far  as  he  helps  us  to  see  that 
these  things  lend  variety  and  facility  to  the  art  of 
living,  and  that  even  when  the  ripples  grow  to  bil- 
lows of  threatening  size  and  aspect  they  are  power- 
less to  thwart  a  man's  progress  so  long  as  he  is  true 
to  himself  and  to  what  he  believes  to  be  the  divine 
purpose  in  his  life,  the  humourist  ministers  to  faith 
and  becomes  an  ally  of  religion. 

The  two  women  who,  late  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury and  early  in  the  nineteenth,  broke  away  from 
the  blood-and-mystery  type  of  novel  which  Mrs.  Rad- 
cliffe  and  Monk  Lewis  had  popularized,  will  serve 
to  illustrate  my  point.  Miss  Edgeworth  is,  I  suppose, 
little  read  to-day  ;  but  Jane  Austen's  popularity  has 
waxed  rather  than  waned  in  the  last  score  of  years ; 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  S13 

indeed,  her  charm  seems  to  have  given  good  proof 
of  its  perennial  quality.  Though  significant  figures, 
they  must  not  detain  us  long.  Both  are  eminently 
genial  in  their  outlook  upon  life.  Both  proceed 
upon  the  basis  of  an  assured  faith  in  God  above,  and 
in  the  worth  of  truth,  chastity,  and  honour  among 
men  below.  It  is  into  such  a  soil  as  this  that  the 
roots  of  their  humour  thrust  themselves  and  are 
strongly  nourished.  If  my  memory  serve  me  aright, 
John  Foster  once  wrote  an  essay  whose  burden  was 
that  Maria  Edgeworth's  novels  were  practically  ir- 
religious, because  worldly,  books ;  and  it  is  not  to 
be  denied  that  their  author  found  herself  very  much 
at  home  for  more  than  four-score  years  in  this  Val- 
ley of  Achor.  It  is  equally  undeniable,  however, 
that  she  managed  to  find  place  and  time  in  her 
pilgrimage  for  the  cultivation  of  some  graces  of  the 
Spirit,  which  even  John  Foster  might  have  envied, 
"  God  made  man  upright,"  saith  the  Scripture, 
and  Richard  Lovell  Edgeworth  we  may  hope  was  no 
violent  exception  to  the  rule  ;  but  scarce  any  man  of 
his  generation  sought  out  more  inventions  —  literal 
inventions,  like  telegraphs,  velocipedes,  and  pedo- 
meters, or  tropical,  like  the  four  wives  and  nineteen 
children  who  eventually  made  up  his  family.  The 
novelist's  place  was  among  the  eldest  of  this  horde, 
and  one  of  her  claims  to  grateful  remembrance  is 
that  she  had  gifts  and  virtues  sufficient  to  enable 
her  to  be  a  dutiful  and  loving  daughter  to  her  father, 
the  affectionate  friend  and  companion  of  her  three 


244  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

stepmothers,  and  a  devoted  teacher  of  their  suc- 
cessive broods.  Unquestionably  the  situation  at 
Edgeworthtown  might  readily  have  lent  itself  to  the 
^  problem '  novelist's  purposes.  Here  were  all  the 
elements  of  irritation,  passion,  and  sordid  tragedy ; 
the  eccentric  and  wilful  father,  the  unfailing  pro- 
cession of  wives,  the  jungle  of  olive-branches ;  and 
among  them  the  gifted  daughter  with  her  ambitions, 
her  impulse  toward  literary  expression,  her  one  great 
personal  romance  —  and  her  burden  of  daily  cares. 
What  wonder  if  she  had  broken  with  it  all,  or  re- 
mained only  to  beat  her  life  out  against  the  bars 
of  her  prison-house  !  But  Maria  Edgeworth  either 
lacked  some  of  the  qualities  which  distinguish  the 
modern  heroine,  or  else  possessed  gifts  denied  to 
that  strenuous  person.  She  did  not  strive  or  cry;  but 
went  about  her  multifarious  tasks  with  a  cheerful 
equanimity  the  tonic  influence  of  which  has  not  yet 
evaporated ;  went  about  them,  too,  with  eyes  wide 
open  to  features  of  Irish  life  which  others  may  have 
seen,  but  of  which  none,  until  her  time,  had  found 
means  to  tell.  She  never  forgot  M.  Edelcrantz,  the 
faithful  Swede  who  would  have  married  her  could 
she  have  been  brought  to  leave  Ireland  and  her 
father's  house ;  nor  did  she  show  signs  of  much  self- 
pity  on  the  score  of  blighted  affection,  though  she 
could  never  hear  any  sudden  reference  to  him  or  his 
people  without  emotion ;  but  from  the  time  when, 
a  mere  girl,  she  convoyed  her  younger  brothers  and 
sisters  from  Edgeworthtown  to  Bristol,  to  the  ex- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  246 

treme  old  age  which  busied  itself  in  relieving  the 
miseries  of  the  great  Famine,  she  lived  a  life  whose 
sensibility  never  degenerated  into  sentimentality 
and  whose  regard  for  the  world  about  her  was 
shrewd,  sane,  and  kind.  Much  of  her  work  was  di- 
dactic —  too  evidently  didactic,  no  doubt,  for  the 
highest  artistic  effect,  and,  perhaps,  for  the  most 
lasting  influence ;  but  generally  speaking,  it  was 
^^  wholesome  as  maize,"  with  that  kind  of  health- 
fulness  which  is  founded  upon  confidence  in  the 
Scheme  of  Things.  Like  Margaret  Fuller,  she  "ac- 
cepted the  Universe,"  but  without  any  heroic  calling 
of  heaven  and  earth  to  witness. 

The  same  judgement  may  be  passed  upon  Jane 
Austen,  whose  general  attitude  toward  life  is  not 
unlike  Miss  Edgeworth's.  Her  years  were  scarcely 
half  as  many,  her  work  much  less  voluminous,  her 
art  of  a  distinctly  finer  quality.  She  had  none  of 
the  encouragement  to  write  and  publish  which  the 
eccentric  Master  of  Edgeworthtown  supplied  to  his 
daughter ;  but  wrought  quietly  at  her  desk  in  the 
common  sitting-room,  keeping  her  own  counsel, 
covering  her  work  from  curious  eyes,  and,  after  it 
was  done,  laying  it  away  altogether  for  a  decade. 
When  at  last  this  discipline  of  obscurity  was  over, 
the  world  of  letters  entered  into  possession  of  the 
most  exquisite  gallery  of  miniatures  which  English 
readers  have  ever  seen  or  are  ever  likely  to  see. 
Indeed  it  is  doubtful  if  what  may  be  called  the 
miniature  method  is  capable  of  clearer  and  more 


246  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

suggestive  effects  than  those  which  she  made  it 
produce.  Her  people,  plots,  and  methods  harmo- 
nize with  the  Hampshire  landscape  which  she  knew 
so  well.  There  is  a  trimness  and  eminent  decency 
about  them  all  which  might  easily  have  become 
smug  and  commonplace  under  a  less  skilful  hand. 
But  Jane  Austen  not  only  had  a  deft  hand;  she 
had  a  keenly  observant  eye  which,  while  peculiarly 
sensitive  to  the  formalities  and  pomposities  of  pro- 
vincial life,  saw  behind  this  curtain  into  its  variety 
of  character ;  and  she  tempered  the  activity  of 
both  eye  and  hand  by  the  generous  impulses  of  a 
tolerant  heart.  Macaulay,  who,  while  quite  capable 
of  extravagance,  rarely  indulged  in  extravagant 
eulogy,  compared  her  work  to  that  of  Shake- 
speare. It  is  dangerous  praise  because  the  reader 
begins  at  once  to  enumerate  the  mighty  Shake- 
spearian qualities  to  which  Jane  Austen  can  lay 
no  claim;  but  it  has  this  saving  remnant  of 
truth,  that  she  understands  her  people  after  a 
Shakespearian  fashion.  The  little  group  who  ap- 
pear upon  her  ivory  tablet  are  instinct  with  as  real 
a  life  as  the  larger  company  upon  Shakespeare's 
stage.  Many  of  them  are  typical ;  they  have  a 
similar  faculty  for  self-revelation,  requiring  little 
description  beyond  that  which  their  own  speech 
supplies;  and  toward  them  all  their  creator  mani- 
fests a  similar  generosity  of  attitude.  It  is  the 
tolerance  not  of  mere  indulgence  or  indifference, 
but  of  faith.  The  little  man,  hot  upon  some  vil- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  247 

Iain's  trail  and  terribly  afraid  lest,  if  he  be  not 
damned  to-day  he  may  miss  damnation  altogether, 
is  a  sufficiently  familiar  figure  in  the  world.  The 
author  who  is  never  satisfied  except  when  plung- 
ing his  villain  in  the  ink-pot,  or  his  fellow  of  quite 
as  irritating  a  type  who  must  needs  insist  that  his 
villain  is  a  hero,  are  both  men  of  little  wit  because 
of  little  faith.  The  masters  of  song  and  story  must 
have  enough  of  God's  creative  faculty  to  use  it 
after  the  divine  manner.  Their  sun  shines  and 
their  rain  falls  upon  the  evil  and  the  good.  Their 
wheat  and  tares  are  permitted  to  grow  together 
until  the  harvest.  They  are  not  hurried  and  exigent 
in  judgement. 

Miss  Austen's  men  and  women  usually  reveal 
their  characters  early  in  our  acquaintance  with 
them,  but  after  such  a  manner  that  we  feel,  if  we 
be  wise  people,  that  much  further  converse  is 
needed  before  any  trustworthy  estimate  can  be 
made.  Meanwhile  she  is  tolerant  of  them  and  asks 
us  to  be  so.  Let  the  reader  open  his  "Pride  and 
Prejudice"  to  the  conversation  between  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Bennet  relative  to  the  new  tenant  of  Neth- 
erfield  Park,  and  he  will  see  what  I  mean.  Mr. 
Bennet' s  satiric  humour  and  the  general  fatuity 
of  his  wife  become  evident  at  the  first  interview. 
These  traits  give  complexion  to  the  characters  of 
both  throughout  the  story;  yet  with  such  general 
truth  to  life  that  neither  quite  bores  us,  while  each 
becomes  a  recognized  type,  and  develops  after  va- 


24S  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

rious  adventures  into  a  person  whom,  in  spite  of 
selfishness  and  limitation,  we  accept  into  the  circle 
of  our  friends.  Let  it  be  admitted  that  the  women 
of  the  creator  of  Elizabeth  Bennet  are  better  than 
her  men ;  it  still  remains  true  that  her  men  —  Mr. 
Bennet,  for  instance,  and  the  Reverend  but  other- 
wise unspeakable  Mr.  Collins  in  the  novel  under 
discussion  —  are  not  unworthy  to  appear  beside 
them.  Together,  her  characters  form  a  group  of 
unimpeachable  witnesses  to  the  interest  of  com- 
mon life :  to  the  variety  underlying  the  everyday 
affairs  of  everyday  people,  if  the  observer  have  an 
eye  capable  of  penetrating  a  thin  disguise  of  hum- 
drum; to  the  abiding  worth  of  truth,  simplicity, 
and  kindness;  and  to  the  wholesome  appetite  for 
living  which  such  qualities  develop.  These  are  pre- 
cisely the  characteristics  which  religion  tends  to 
foster  when  accepted  and  cultivated  in  a  large  and 
generous  way.  They  as  surely  atrophy  and  give 
place  to  a  sort  of  bitterness,  sometimes  cynical, 
sometimes  querulous,  and  again  passionately  tragic, 
when  faith  fails. 

Sir  Walter  Scott  is  perhaps  the  greatest  exemplar 
of  the  truth  which  Maria  Ed  ofe worth  and  Jane  Aus- 
ten  thus  illustrated.  He  was  a  chief  of  the  romantic 
movement,  which  touched  them  only  lightly  if  at 
all.  He  was  a  poet  of  considerable  distinction  and 
almost  unexampled  popularity,  while  they  wrote  lit- 
tle more  than  occasional  verses.  He  was  moreover 
an  essayist  and  historian  whose  work  in  these  de- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  249 

partments  of  letters  is  still  remembered  and  some- 
times read.  But  it  was  a  true  instinct  which  led  him 
with  characteristic  humility  to  acknowledge  his  in- 
debtedness to  Miss  Edgeworth  and  his  admiration  of 
Miss  Austen ;  for  he  was  to  achieve  a  colossal  emi- 
nence —  I  do  not  think  the  adjective  extravagant 
—  through  the  application  to  Hterature  of  the  same 
general  romantic  principles  and  convictions  which 
animated  them.  He  has  left  a  record  of  the  ambi- 
tion with  which  a  reading  of  Miss  Edgeworth's 
"Castle  Rackrent/'  "The  Absentee,"  and  "Or- 
mond  "  inspired  him.  "  I  felt  that  something  might 
be  attempted  for  my  own  country  of  the  same  kind 
with  that  which  she  has  so  fortunately  achieved 
for  Ireland."  His  comment  upon  Miss  Austen's 
work  after  a  third  reading  of  "  Pride  and  Prejudice  " 
is  so  well  known  as  to  be  almost  hackneyed.  "  The 
Big  Bow-wow  strain  I  can  do  myself  like  any 
now  going ;  but  the  exquisite  touch,  which  renders 
ordinary  commonplace  things  and  characters  inter- 
esting, from  the  truth  of  the  description  and  the 
sentiment,  is  denied  to  me." '  A  host  of  the  humbler 
children  of  his  own  imagination,  who  are  known  to 
a  wider  circle  of  readers  than  Miss  Austen  can  ever 
expect,  rise  up  to  question  the  sweep  of  this  dis- 
claimer ;  but  the  generosity  which  breathes  through 
both  these  tributes  was  perfectly  characteristic,  and 
introduces  us  at  once  to  the  nobler  and  more  spirit- 
ual side  of  Sir  Walter's  nature.  To  say  that  this 
*  Diary,  March  14, 1826.  Lockhart's  Life  of  Scott,  vol.  vi,  chap.  7. 

rr-THE 
UNIVERSITY  II 


250  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

generosity  was  always  impartially  exercised  would 
be  to  claim  too  much.  Like  most  rich  and  romantic 
natures,  he  was  capable  of  strong  prejudices  which 
were  never  concealed  and  rarely  very  rigidly  re- 
pressed. The  pageants  of  warfare,  the  sound  of  drum 
and  trumpet,  the  gallant  pomp  and  circumstance  of 
chivalry,  the  mingled  majesty  and  pettiness  of  courts, 
fascinated  him.  Foreordained  from  the  foundation 
of  the  world  to  be  a  Loyalist  and  to  cast  in  his  lot 
with  what  may  be  called  the  Stuart  element  in  life, 
he  yet  did  it  all  nobly  enough  to  escape  the  super- 
cilious narrowness  and  conceit  of  mere  Toryism.  A 
lover  of  the  past,  and  especially  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
which  he  painted  "  as  we  should  have  wished  them 
to  have  been,"  he  was  yet  no  mere  reactionary,  but 
a  full-blooded  and  warm-hearted  man  among  men. 
If  we  cannot  sympathize  with  his  reverence  for  king- 
ship when  kingship  was  embodied  in  George  IV, 
we  can  at  least  remember  that  he  was  one  of  those 
believers  in  rank  who  can  make  honest  friends  in  a 
class  beneath  their  own,  as  the  memory  of  Tom  Pur- 
die  and  the  mutual  affection  which  existed  between 
him  and  his  master  bear  witness  to  this  day.  It 
also  remains  true  that  some  of  the  characters  whom 
Scott  chose  from  among  the  poor,  like  Davie  Deans 
and  his  daughter,  or  Caleb  Balderstone,  are  quite 
as  sure  of  immortality  as  the  rather  complexion- 
less  though  very  gentlemanly  Guy  Mannering  and 
Edward  Waverley. 

As  contrasted  with  the  religious  and  philosophic 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  251 

doubters,  Scott  was  so  pronounced  a  believer  that 
he  felt  under  little  obligation  to  make  explicit  con- 
fessions of  faith  ;  but  the  truth  which  seemed  most 
self-evident  to  him  was  that  God  made  man  in  His 
own  image  and  endowed  him  with  something  of 
His  own  creative  power ;  while  the  command  which 
made  immediate  appeal  to  his  nature  was  that  which 
directed  him  to  replenish  and  subdue  the  earth  and 
to  have  dominion  in  it. 

Here  in  the  realm  of  creative  faculty  Scott 
wrought  by  authority  of  genuine  inspiration.  He 
was  a  poet  in  the  old  Greek  sense  of  '  maker/  and 
by  a  better  right  than  his  verse-making  could  con- 
fer, spirited  as  the  verses  are.  It  is  when  we  think 
of  him  in  this  aspect  of  creator  that  our  patience  is 
most  sorely  tried  by  the  swarm  of  critics  who  have 
condescended  to  him,  patronized  him,  and  assured 
us  that  he  did  as  well  as  could  be  expected  in  view  of 
the  imperfect  understanding  of  the  art  of  fiction 
prevalent  in  his  day.  To  name,  with  reluctance  in 
this  connection,  the  best  of  them,  one  wonders 
how  so  good  and  generally  sensible  a  critic  as  Mr. 
Howells  —  the  master  of  so  pretty  an  art  of  his  own 
withal — could  have  brought  himself  to  comfort 
readers  who  were  a  little  perturbed  at  being  told  that 
Sir  Walter's  day  was  passed,  with  the  assurance  that 
after  all  "  he  can  still  amuse  young  people."  It  is 
well  said  rather  than  well  meant.  Balaam-like,  Mr. 
Howells  has  blessed  when  he  thought  to  curse  ;  for 
not  only  has  Sir  Walter  Scott  amused  young  people 


252  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

for  more  than  four-score  years  :  during  no  small  por- 
tion of  that  time  they  have  been  the  same  people,  who 
have  found  their  youth  renewed  and  their  pulses 
genially  quickened  as  they  rode  across  the  Border 
or  went  on  pilgrimage  with  him.  "  We  did  not  one 
of  us  go  to  bed  last  night ;  nothing  slept  but  my 
gout,"  said  Lord  Holland  when  asked  his  opinion  of 
"  Old  Mortahty  "  after  a  night  with  it ;  and  though 
the  day  for  such  enthusiasm  is  doubtless  gone,  the 
stimulus  and  tonic  of  Scott's  presence  are  still  real. 
He  is  accused  of  failure  to  make  his  people  speak  in 
character,  and  Mr.  Brander  Matthews  opines  that 
the  stories  most  likely  "  to  retain  readers  in  the  first 
quarter  of  the  twentieth  century  are  perhaps  those 
in  which  he  best  withstands  the  comparison  with 
Miss  Edge  worth."  Now  I  am  altogether  disposed  to 
admit  that  Miss  Edgeworth  knew  her  art  —  and  her 
place ;  and  he  who  runs  may  still  read  the  letter  to 
Ballantyne  in  which  she  praises  the  author  of  "  Wa- 
verley "  "  for  the  perfect  manner  in  which  character 
is  ever  sustained  in  every  change  of  situation  from 
first  to  last,  without  effort,  without  the  affectation 
of  making  the  persons  speak  in  character."  *  From 
the  standpoint  of  the  photographer.  Turner  is  un- 
questionably erratic;  and  many  a  clever  moulder 
in  clay  is,  when  face  to  face  with  Michael  Angelo, 
abundantly  competent  to  criticise  the  symmetry  of 
Moses's  horns;  yet  the  glory  of  Turner's  colour  does 

»  Letter  to  the  Author  of  "  Waverley,"  ^w<  Scotus^aut  Didbolus ; 
Oct  23, 1814. 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  253 

not  fade  nor  does  Michael  Angelo's  grotesque  and 
mistaken  literalism  rob  Moses's  face  of  majesty.  It 
is  not  true  that  the  possession  of  great  creative 
faculty  sets  men  above  the  immutable  laws  of  right 
and  wrong ;  but  it  does  give  them  a  charter  to 
speak  their  own  language  and  to  contemn,  if  they 
choose,  the  latest  fashions  in  literary  and  artistic 
phylacteries. 

Perhaps  the  most  significant  criticism  of  the  re- 
ligious element  in  Scott's  work  is  that  by  Walter 
Bagehot,  who  not  only  illuminated  economic  mat- 
ters by  the  play  of  a  lusty  imagination,  but  brought 
to  the  criticism  of  literature  and  religion  the  trained 
sagacity  of  a  financier.  He  notes  in  his  admira- 
ble essay  on  the  Waverley  Novels,*  that  creeds  are 
among  the  author's  data.  They  are  taken  for  granted. 
Each  character  has  his  faith  and  keeps  it.  There  is  no 
doubt,  no  unbelief,  scarce  any  shadow  upon  faith 
cast  by  the  turning  of  circumstance.  This  means, 
not  that  Scott  was  indifferent  to  religion  ;  but  rather 
that  his  own  faith  was  of  the  sort  which  he  depicts, 
—  sturdy,  unshaken,  careless  of  definition,  equally 
careless  of  perfect  consistency  perhaps,  but  accepted 
as  the  necessary  background  of  a  sane  and  whole- 
some life.  He  does  not  often  care  to  inquire  into 
the  fundamental  pro  and  con  of  it ;  but  when  he 
does  picture  the  soul  face  to  face  with  its  great  ques- 
tions, as  in  the  case  of  the  camp-followers  in  "  Quen- 
tin  Durward  "  under  condemnation  of  death  and 

*  Literary  StudieSy  vol.  ii. 


254  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

discussing  their  possible  future,  the  reader  feels  his 
power.  He  chose  ordinarily  to  treat  religion  in  its 
outward  aspects,  as  a  part  of  the  gear  or  furnishing 
of  every  normal  life.  Only  with  difficulty  could  he 
understand  the  Puritan,  because  the  Puritan  based 
his  religion  very  largely  upon,  or  perhaps,  better, 
built  it  up  about,  a  great,  central,  personal  experi- 
ence, and  it  was  no  part  of  Scott's  general  plan  to 
enter  life's  holy  of  holies.  He  Hked  better  the  inter- 
play of  character  and  incident  as  it  appeared  in  the 
outer  courts,  where  men  dealt  with  one  another, 
than  the  transactions  of  the  confessional  or  the  altar, 
where  they  dealt  with  God.  Indeed  he  has  the  preju- 
dice of  a  man  of  the  world  against  much  reference 
to  closet  and  altar. 

One  of  the  grounds  of  complaint  against  the  Pu- 
ritan is  that  he  emphasized  so  pronouncedly  this 
personal  relation  of  accountability  to  God.  Ever 
conscious  of  the  Great  Taskmaster's  eye,  the  Puri- 
tan's main  concern  was  to  meet  its  approval ;  this 
gained,  he  could  afford  to  be  indifferent  to  all  else. 
Conscious  too  that  his  soul  was  naked  and  open  be- 
fore Him  with  whom  he  had  to  do,  he  too  often  stood 
spiritually  naked  and  unashamed  before  his  fellows. 
Not  only  was  this  naturally  unpleasant  to  a  man  of 
Scott's  character  and  tastes,  but  the  Puritan  speech 
which  grew  out  of  these  deep  experiences  and  which 
was  vividly  coloured  by  them  must  have  proved 
equally  repulsive  to  him ;  especially  and  rightfully 
so  when  its  great  terms  became  commonplace  and 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  255 

degenerated,  as  it  were,  into  the  small  change  of 
daily  and  worldly  business.  Here  lay  the  snare  of 
hypocrisy  in  which  the  feet  of  Puritanism  were  too 
often  entangled.  The  outstanding,  purposeful  hypo- 
crite whom  ill-natured  critics  so  generally  clothe  in 
Puritan  garb  was  no  more  likely  to  appear  in  conven- 
ticle than  in  cathedral ;  probably  less  likely,  since, 
from  the  standpoint  of  worldly  advantage,  the  cathe- 
dral has  usually  had  more  to  offer;  but  there  is 
danger  lest  the  soul,  ploughed  deep  and  made  fruit- 
ful by  experience,  shall,  if  too  often  thrown  open  to 
curiosity-seekers,  or  even  to  those  bent  on  profit  and 
instruction,  be  beaten  back  into  its  old  encrusted 
barrenness  again  ;  danger,  too,  lest  terms  once  warm 
with  vital  meaning  shall  become  cold  and  insig- 
nificant as  they  grow  common ;  until  the  unwary, 
having  learned  to  say  the  words,  are  deceived  into 
fancying  that  they  possess  the  thing. 

Scott  never  learned  to  observe  these  great  distinc- 
tions ;  never  seemed  to  remember  that  there  cannot 
be  an  arrant  hypocrisy  without  an  equally  eminent 
reality  from  which  to  copy ;  but  loved  to  make  his 
Puritan  and  Covenanter  types  extreme.  It  is  not 
here  that  his  genuinely  religious  sense  —  a  sort  of 
religious  common-sense  —  appears  to  best  advan- 
tage. This  product  of  religion  furnished  him  much 
material  which  he  used  with  considerable  effect, 
though  the  type  of  character  forged  from  it  does 
not  always  ring  artistically  true.  Now  and  then, 
however,  as  in  "  The  Heart  of  Mid-Lothian,"    he 


256  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"went  deeper  into  reality.  Those  who  say  that  Scott 
always  worked  from  without  and  never  sounded  the 
depths  of  human  passion  must  reckon  with  Jeanie 
Deans ;  as  must  the  other  critics  who  are  dubious 
of  his  ability  to  paint  a  genuine  woman.  The  fig- 
ures of  David  and  Jeanie  Deans  deserve  a  place 
in  the  same  gallery  which  preserves  the  "  Cottar's 
Saturday  Night."  Like  Burns  before  and  Carlyle 
after  him,  Scott  discerned  the  source  of  his  coun- 
try's power.  He  knew  that  it  lay  in  no  small  measure 
in  the  "  pure  religion  breathing  household  laws  " 
which  these  groups  exemplify,  and  which  Davie 
illustrates  the  more  perfectly  as  we  observe  the 
struggle  between  love,  pride,  and  reverence  for  law 
in  his  nature.  The  love  and  fear  which  lay  at  the 
heart  of  genuine  Puritan  character  were  never  meant 
to  be  antagonistic.  Their  final  purpose  is  mutual 
enrichment;  and  if  one  struggle  to  cast  out  the 
other  it  is  like  the  wrestling  of  Jacob  with  his  guard- 
ian angel.  In  the  better  balanced  Puritan  natures 
the  fear  —  which  simply  represented  a  believer's 
sense  of  the  majesty  and  exigence  of  Law  in  the 
spiritual  world,  corresponding  thus  to  the  similar 
revelation  which  science  has  made  of  late  in  the 
realm  of  physical  phenomena  —  kept  the  love  from 
degenerating  into  sentimentality;  while  the  love  tem- 
pered the  fear  into  reverence.  Of  course  it  has  not 
often  suited  a  romancer's  purpose  to  represent  the 
better  balanced  Puritan  natures,  and  it  certainly  did 
not  suit  Scott's.  He  could  make  profit  of  the  super- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  257 

stition  and  fanaticism  which  are  among  the  diseased 
by-products  of  the  spiritual  nature,  and  in  "  Old 
Mortality"  has  given  us  an  ever-memorable  picture 
of  religious  ferocity.  Even  here,  however,  he  scarce 
attempts  to  deal  with  the  soul,  but  contents  himself 
with  the  outward  phenomena  of  Habakkuk  Muckle- 
wrath  and  his  insanity. 

There  is  therefore  some  ground  for  Bagehot's 
criticism  of  Scott  for  his  neglect  to  give  us  "a  de- 
lineation of  the  soul." 

"  We  have  mind,  manners,  animation,  but  it  is  the 
stir  of  this  world.  We  miss  the  consecrating  power ; 
and  we  miss  it  not  only  in  its  own  peculiar  sphere, 
which,  from  the  difficulty  of  introducing  the  deepest 
elements  into  a  novel,  would  have  been  scarcely  mat- 
ter for  a  harsh  criticism,  but  in  the  place  where  a  nov- 
elist might  most  be  expected  to  deHneate  it," 

that  is,  in  the  love  affairs  of  his  heroes  and  hero- 
ines. Bagehot,  keen  and,  in  the  main,  just  as  his 
criticism  is,  seems  to  me  inclined  to  push  it  too  far. 
It  is  doubtful  if  the  Waverley  Novels  would  have 
profited  by  more  psychology ;  they  might  have  been 
enriched  by  a  wider  and  deeper  sympathy  with  re- 
ligious experience.  Yet  even  this  measure  of  fault- 
finding must  be  qualified  by  grateful  recognition  of 
the  fact  that  Scott's  world  was  after  all  essentially 
divine.  A  great,  mysterious,  far-reaching,  and,  as 
he  dared  to  believe,  ultimately  benevolent  Power 
wrought  in  it  at  His  task  of  reward  and  retribu- 
tion. Whatever  life  might  be,  —  and  he  made  small 


268'  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

attempt  to  define  it,  —  honour,  courage,  mercy,  and 
reverence  fitted  its  needs  and  ministered  to  its 
development.  Whatever  death  might  be,  —  and 
through  all  his  work  the  fascination  of  its  mystery 
appears,  —  nothing  so  well  prepared  a  man  for  its 
adventure  as  that  goodness  which  is  religion's  best 
fruit.  "  My  dear,  be  a  good  man  .  .  .  be  a  good  man. 
Nothing  else  will  give  you  any  comfort  when  you 
come  to  lie  here."  There  may  be  those  who  fail  to 
discern  a  distinctly  religious,  to  say  nothing  of  a 
Christian,  element  in  this.  By  so  much  they  miss 
the  deeper  import  of  Christianity's  Founder. 

Something  of  the  same  enterprise  upon  which 
Scott  embarked  when  he  revived  the  romantic  novel 
and  gave  it  an  historic  setting,  was  undertaken 
along  different  lines  by  Cooper  and  Marryat.  They 
could  lay  no  claim  to  Scott's  genius ;  nor  did  they 
attempt  his  elaborate  historical  framework.  Both 
however  showed  originality  and  ability  in  depicting 
scenes  and  phases  of  life  which  were  eminently 
characteristic  of  their  youth,  and  which  were  threat- 
ened with  supersession,  if  not  with  extinction,  by  the 
material  progress  of  the  century.  Cooper's  interest 
in  the  Frontier  was  as  real  and  natural  as  Scott's  in 
the  Border.  Both  Cooper  and  Marryat  knew  the  sea 
at  first  hand,  and  felt  as  keen  a  relish  for  perpetu- 
ating those  features  of  its  life  which  were  threatened 
by  steam,  as  Scott  felt  for  the  loyalties  and  feuds  of 
the  Highlands  into  which  southern  civilization  was 
making  fatal  inroads.  In  the  spirit  which  animated 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  259 

them  and  the  wholesome  atmosphere  wherein  their 
stories  all  develop,  they  are  worthy  of  their  elder 
and  greater  brother.  Any  detailed  criticism  of  their 
work  is  denied  to  us  here ;  but  it  is  worth  while  to 
notice  that  not  only  were  both  sympathetic  with  the 
commonly  received  Christianity  of  their  day,  but 
both  could  go  out  of  their  way  to  support  pet  theo- 
logical or  ecclesiastical  tenets.  Cooper,  who  lacked 
a  highly  developed  sense  of  humour,  was  capable 
in  the  "  The  Crater  "  of  almost  swamping  a  capital 
sea-story  by  overloading  it  with  dissertations  upon 
the  advantages  of  episcopacy  and  the  dangers  inhe- 
rent in  democracy ;  Marryat,  whose  humour  was  as 
natural  and  sometimes  as  effervescent  as  that  of 
Dickens,  avoids  these  grosser  pitfalls,  but  even  he 
likes  to  mount  the  pulpit  now  and  then,  especially 
in  such  a  book  as  "Masterman  Keady."  Indeed,  one 
unfeeling  editor  of  this  classic  ventures  a  sigh  of 
relief  at  the  old  sailor's  death,  exhibiting  thereby 
his  own  lack  of  insight  into  the  hearts  of  seamen 
and  of  boys.  For,  though  neither  Cooper  nor  Mar- 
ryat was  a  perfect  artist,  both  knew  that  the  disci- 
pline and  peril  of  the  sea  breed  not  only  recklessness 
and  desperation,  but  deep  and  beautiful  reverences 
as  well.  Life  on  shipboard  is  no  school  for  saints  of 
the  ascetic  type;  but  like  life  upon  the  frontier  or 
in  the  forests,  it  sometimes  nurtures  a  faith  at  once 
humble  and  robust.  Long  Tom  Coffin  and  old  Ready 
have  the  hearts  of  little  children ;  the  courage,  en- 
durance, and  staunchness  of  heroes ;  not  a  little  of 


260  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  gentleness  which  becomes  heroism  so  well ;  and 
an  implicit  faith  in  God  above,  in  His  guidance  of 
mundane  affairs,  and  in  a  merciful  but  retributive 
justice  which  shall  one  day  declare  itself,  to  the  con- 
fusion of  all  dishonour  and  the  exaltation  of  right- 
eousness. They  recognized  and  did  reverence  to  the 
nearer  and  more  obvious  mysteries  which  inhere  in 
life  and  death.  But  the  subtler  dilemmas  which  both 
faced  in  the  warfare  waged  against  their  fellow-men 
—  a  struggle  in  which  Tom  Coffin  rejoiced,  and 
which,  when  forced  upon  Ready,  he  undertook  in 
self-defence  without  a  qualm  —  play  no  larger  part 
in  either  story  than  they  played  in  the  life  of  its 
author's  day.  It  is  as  well.  There  are  deeps  in  ex- 
perience which  may  be  sailed  upon  with  profit  long 
before  we  find  ourselves  able  to  sound  them.  Cooper 
and  Marryat  are  sure  of  an  abiding  though  mod- 
est fame,  because  they  describe  a  life  in  which  the 
capacity  of  man  to  compel  the  service  of  nature's 
rudest  forces  is  most  brilliantly  illustrated,  and  be- 
cause their  story  is  instinct  with  reverence  for  great 
and  wholesome  things,  —  God,  fatherland,  truth, 
honour,  duty,  and  clean  love. 

The  transition  from  Cooper  and  Marryat  to  Poe 
is  like  a  plunge  from  noon  to  midnight;  though  it 
may  be  added  that  the  noon  is  of  ordinary  day- 
light, while  the  midnight  is  of  unique  mystery,  as 
though  the  sun  were  not  only  turned  to  darkness, 
but  the  moon  to  blood,  and  the  very  stars  to  bale- 
fires. Much  good  paper  has  been  soiled  by  the  con- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  261 

troversy  over  Poe's  character — or  lack  of  it.  Suf- 
fice it  to  say  here  that  he  was  capable  on  the  one 
hand  of  great  virtues  and  great  vices,  and  that  he 
tested  his  capacity;  but  that, on  the  other  hand,  he 
seemed  incapable  of  the  measure  of  self-control 
necessary  to  a  mastery  of  the  art  of  living  with  his 
fellows.  His  career  was  a  tragedy  for  which  no 
one  but  himself  can  be  held  responsible ;  his  death, 
following  upon  a  debauch  encouraged  if  not  in- 
duced by  a  gang  of  base  politicians  in  order  that 
they  might  use  him  as  a  "  repeater  "  in  a  Baltimore 
election,  is  well-nigh  as  grotesque  a  horror  as  any 
which  he  ever  imagined.  What  his  personal  atti- 
tude toward  faith  may  have  been  it  is  probably 
useless  to  inquire.  He  did  not  choose  in  his  pub- 
lished writings  to  say  much  about  it  beyond  what 
is  contained  in  his  strange  "Eureka,"  from  which 
those  who  can  are  welcome  to  extract  a  coherent 
utterance.  His  conversation  filled  one  man  with 
admiration  not  merely  for  the  gifts  of  his  mind 
but  for  the  graces  of  his  heart;  while  another 
heard  only  the  words  of  defiance,  blasphemy,  and 
reprobation.  Perhaps  both  are  right.  Poe  was  not 
only  many-sided  like  most  men;  he  seems — unlike 
most  men — to  have  been  gifted  with  the  ability 
permanently  to  impress  the  stamp  of  his  different 
phases  upon  different  groups  of  people. 

To-day  his  place  as  the  high-priest  of  all  who 
worship  the  grotesque  is  secure.  They  are  not  an 
altogether  wholesome  company;  yet  their  existence 


2^  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  their  cult  is  significant.  In  a  sense  Poe's  work 
constitutes  a  genuine  religious  apologetic;  his  tes- 
timony to  the  abiding  place  and  power  of  faith  is 
real  if  not  great;  it  is  convincing  so  far  as  it  goes 
even  if  it  do  not  go  very  far.  The  tribute  which  he 
pays  to  faith  is  comparable  to  that  which  supersti- 
tion pays  to  religion.  Superstition  has  this  basis  in 
truth,  that  it  arises  out  of  a  consciousness  of  the 
mystery  of  life  and  of  the  proximity  of  forces 
which  from  the  standpoint  of  present  experience 
are  to  be  feared. 

Sin  brings  judgement;  death  introduces  evident 
confusion  into  life  here,  and  may  introduce  a  yet 
more  poignant  suffering  into  some  life  beyond;  so 
the  man  of  primitive  religious  culture  reasons,  or 
feels  if  he  does  not  reason.  The  untamed  forces  of 
nature  suggest  sin  and  death  to  him.  Seeing  the 
part  which  selfishness  and  arbitrary  whim  play  in 
the  life  about  him,  he  leaps  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  ultimate  powers  of  the  universe  are  susceptible 
of  a  similar  but  vastly  more  significant  petulance, 
and  hence  they  must  be  propitiated  in  strange  and 
whimsical  ways ;  and  since  there  is  always  cause  for 
fear  in  dealing  with  selfish  and  petulant  natures, 
lest  one  should  not  do  enough  or  should  do  the 
wrong  thing,  and  since  fear  is  cruel,  superstition 
issues  naturally  in  cruel  and  horrid  rites.  Amid  a 
thousand  grotesque  or  dreadful  forms  one  feature 
of  superstition  remains  constant.  The  superstitious 
paan  is  always  the  inadequate  man;   he  is  never 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  263 

master  of  his  fate;  he  has  no  key  to  experience; 
by  so  much  as  he  doubts  the  sanity  of  the  uni- 
verse, his  own  sanity  and  self-control  are  weakened. 
It  is  the  office  of  rehgion  to  reassure  him  by  its 
insistence  upon  the  ultimate  solvency  of  the  scheme 
of  things.  It  speaks  of  the  power  and  the  love  of 
God.  It  exhorts  a  man  to  cultivate  those  graces  of 
power  and  love  which  are  the  image  in  himself 
of  the  divine  nature;  to  get  rid  of  sin  by  way  of 
repentance  and  forgiveness ;  to  cast  in  his  lot  with 
the  forces  that  make  for  righteousness;  and  then 
to  rejoice  in  the  assurance  of  faith.  Religion  always 
makes  for  courage  because  it  assures  a  man  that, 
having  thus  cast  in  his  lot  with  God,  he  is  ade- 
quate to  all  experience.  Mysteries  remain ;  but  their 
sting  of  fear  is  plucked  away.  Sin  has  still  to  be 
reckoned  with;  but  like  a  foul  disease  which  for- 
giveness can  purge.  Death  waits ;  but  to  serve  in- 
stead of  to  conquer  the  forces  of  highest  life.  The 
superstitious  and  the  religious  man  look  out  upon 
the  same  scene;  they  behold  and  bear  witness  to 
the  same  untamed  elements  in  experience.  Yet  with 
this  difference :  the  superstitious  man  creeps  in  fear 
under  hedges,  or  shakes  with  horror  in  corners, 
not  daring  to  look  experience  squarely  in  the  face, 
exaggerating  its  possible  fearfulness  because  he 
has  caught  but  glimpses  of  it,  and  making  ready, 
should  it  finally  seek  him  out,  to  propitiate  it  by 
wild  and  dreadful  homage.  The  religious  man  is 
in  the  saddle  on  life's  main  highway;  looking  out 


264  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  clear  eyes;  armed  as  he  believes  adequately  for 
such  conflict  as  may  be  required  of  him ;  and  very 
confident  that,  unless  he  grow  boastful  and  self- 
satisfied,  strength  will  be  supplied  not  only  to  en- 
able him  to  give  a  good  account  of  himself,  but  to 
tame  and  turn  to  friendly  use  these  very  enemies 
which  his  neighbour  fears.  He  meets  in  the  sun- 
shine, with  a  brave  front,  and  to  his  profit,  that 
which  the  other  dreads  and  shuns. 

The  grotesque  in  literature  smacks  usually  either 
of  humour  or  of  horror.  It  may  be  the  product  of 
a  robust  faith's  play,  as  in  the  humour  of  Kabelais, 
Dickens,  or  "Mr.  Dooley."  This  is  sometimes 
coarse  and  even  gross,  as  Eabelaisian  humour 
proverbially  is;  it  is  sometimes  farcical,  like  that 
of  Pickwick ;  or  again  good-naturedly  satirical,  like 
that  of  the  Archey  Road  philosopher.  But  its  gro- 
tesqueness,  being  born  of  exaggeration  which,  how- 
ever absurd,  is  still  open  and  all  in  the  daylight, 
remains  relatively  sound  and  wholesome.  It  is  the 
exaggeration  of  patent  and  perhaps  commonplace 
realities. 

The  grotesqueness  of  horror,  on  the  other  hand, 
comes  of  the  exaggeration  of  mystery.  It  catches 
the  shadows,  which  lengthen  as  the  sweet  and 
wholesome  sun  goes  down  into  creatures  of  dusk 
and  phantoms  of  midnight.  To  these  things  which 
commonly  inspire  doubt  in  the  mind,  even  while 
they  half  fascinate  the  imagination,  it  gives  a  sort 
of  dreadful  validity.  To  assign  them  a  local  habita- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  265 

tion  and  a  name  would  be  to  go  too  far  and  to  rob 
them  of  something  of  their  power.  The  master  of 
the  grotesquely  dreadful  strives  to  make  a  Presence 
felt — a  Presence  undefinable  as  the  obscurity  which 
frames  it,  but  near  and  real  as  conscience,  subtly 
powerful  as  the  breath  of  pestilence,  inevitable  and 
sinister  as  fate. 

Poe's  best  work  is  a  telling  reminder  of  man's 
powerlessness  and  misery  in  the  realm  where  faith 
is  denied  to  him.  His  Tales  of  Conscience,  like 
"William  Wilson"  and  "The  Man  of  the  Crowd," 
are  significant  of  the  inevitable  nature  of  remorse. 
There  is  little  condemnation  in  them,  but  there  is 
absolutely  no  hope.  To  make  the  contrast  between 
superstition  and  faith  complete  they  need  to  be 
read  in  conjunction  with  the  first  chapter  of  Isaiah, 
whose  hope  is  as  reasonable  and  indomitable  as  its 
indictment  of  sin  is  explicit.  But  the  Tales  of  Con- 
science are  neither  the  most  artistic  nor  the  most 
significant  to  religion  of  Poe's  work.  It  is  in  the 
even  more  dreadful  and  enthralling  narratives,  like 
the  "Fall  of  the  House  of  Usher,"  the  "Masque 
of  the  Red  Death,"  the  "Facts  in  the  Case  of  M. 
Valdemar,"  and  the  "Narrative  of  A.  Gordon 
Pym"^  that  his  power  to  marshal  the  forces  of 
terror  comes  into  full  play.  Here  we  find  men  face 

^  I  do  not  claim  that  this  "  Narrative  "  stands  upon  the  artistic 
level  of  the  shorter  "  Tales  ; "  but  it  is  at  once  of  great  interest  and 
much  significance  to  those  who  either  know  the  sea  or  wish  to 
know  Foe. 


^65  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

to  face  with  the  mystery  of  sin,  or  disease,  or 
death;  mystery  which  is  moreover  girt  about  with 
power  and  wrapped  in  a  cloud  of  haunting  fear. 
Nor  can  the  fear  be  resolved.  The  man  is  in  thrall 
to  it.  He  is  reft  out  of  his  natural  element  of  light, 
reason,  and  faith.  Anything  may  come  to  pass — 
except  the  normal  and  healthy.  Pym  and  his  com- 
panions are  helpless  in  the  grip  of  fate,  which  will 
not  let  them  profit  by  their  sailor's  skill  and  mas- 
tery of  circumstance,  but  mocks  them  with  doom. 
The  experimenter  with  the  corpse  of  Valdemar  ap- 
proaches the  verge  of  miraculous  success;  resus- 
citation seems  imminent.  But  all  the  while  Poe's 
demon  is  working  his  dreadful  will  upon  the  tis- 
sues. The  dead  man's  apparent  response  to  mag- 
netic influence  is  a  ghastly  mockery,  to  be  kept  up 
only  during  the  term  of  their  relative  integrity. 
Its  period  reached,  decay  asserts  itself  instanta- 
neously, and  what  was  once  the  form  of  a  man 
becomes  a  thing  to  be  fled  from  with  fear  and 
loathing. 

This  is  the  underlying  motive  of  the  '^  Tales  of 
the  Grotesque  and  Arabesque."  Man  is  taken  out 
of  the  realm  of  light,  reason,  and  capacity  for  do- 
minion, in  which  God  set  him,  and  made  subject  to 
weird  and  baleful  dsemonic  influences.  Death,  sin, 
and  mystery  are,  to  be  sure,  in  man's  world ;  but 
they  need  never  tyrannize  over  any  man  who  will 
claim  his  birthright  of  faith.  Indeed  he  never  looms 
so  large  as  when  asserting  his  claim  to  manhood  in 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  267 

their  apparent  despite.  Take  this  away,  make  him 
subject  to  these  great  servants  of  his,  and  he  not 
only  shrinks  into  relative  impotence  himself,  but 
the  sight  of  him  thus  harassed  and  haunted  sends 
a  thrill  of  fear  to  the  heart  of  the  beholder.  "  Thus 
it  might  be  in  the  world,"  he  says  to  himself, "  should 
the  sun  of  God's  reason  suffer  eclipse,  or  His  image 
in  man  fade  out." 

A  very  different  manifestation  of  the  grimness 
which  verges  upon  the  grotesque  of  terror  appears 
in  the  work  of  Charlotte  and  Emily  Bronte,  induced 
no  doubt,  upon  the  one  hand,  by  the  disappoint- 
ments and  contradictions  of  their  lives,  and  upon 
the  other  by  the  bleakness  of  the  great  uplands  amid 
which  they  dwelt.  It  would  be  easy  to  illustrate  this 
from  "  Jane  Eyre  "  or  "  Shirley."  No  one  who  has 
read  the  former  will  be  likely  to  forget  the  night 
of  Jane's  introduction  to  Rochester's  house,  with 
its  "  characteristics  of  sad  sky,  cold  gale,  and  con- 
tinued small,  penetrating  rain  "  ;  while  the  often 
quoted  passage  from  the  latter,  picturing  the  autumn 
storm  beating  upon  Jessy's  grave,  is  its  worthy  com- 
panion. Wind,  rain,  and  winter  bring  something 
more  than  weather  into  the  work  of  the  Brontes  ; 
they  dominate  and  give  essential  complexion  to  it, 
as  Egdon  Heath  rules  Mr.  Hardy's  "  Return  of  the 
Native " ;  and  it  is  for  this  reason  that  I  should 
choose  the  "  Wuthering  Heights  "  of  Emily  Bronte 
as  representing  most  vividly  the  characteristics  of 
their  thought.  The  very  name  is  but  the  Yorkshire 


268  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

form  of  '  Weathering ; '  yet  the  storms  which  assault 
the  outside  of  these  grim  stone  walls  are  a  mere 
shadow  of  the  elemental  conflict  within,  as  Heath- 
cliff  works  out  his  lifelong  scheme  of  revenge.  The 
life  at  Wuthering  Heights  has  its  times  and  seasons 
like  the  moor  outside ;  but,  still  like  the  moor,  it 
is  never  genial.  The  best  that  these  passionate  lives 
can  do  in  the  interests  of  peace  reaches  only  to  the 
extent  of  a  brief  armed  neutrality,  behind  whose 
screen  the  forces  of  scorn,  hate,  and  half-insane 
love  rearrange  themselves  for  a  new  outbreak.  The 
reader  will  remember  that  at  the  last,  when  Heath- 
cliff  is  found  dead,  it  is  not  only  with  the  marks  of 
scorn  and  hate  still  stamped  upon  his  features,  but 
with  hair  and  raiment  sodden  by  the  rain  which  has 
beaten  through  the  open  window  beside  which  he 
died.  The  incident  is  more  than  accident.  After  such 
a  fashion  was  this  man's  nature  the  plaything  of  sav- 
age and  sinister  influence  from  childhood.  Master 
— and  ruthless  master  —  of  every  creature  that  dwelt 
with  him,  he  was  never  master  of  his  own  soul.  Hav- 
ing played  his  game  with  fate  and  been  defeated, 
he  bids  fair  at  the  last  —  it  is  almost  the  only  gleam 
of  warm  sunshine  that  the  book  contains — to  be 
balked  in  his  ultimate  revenge  by  the  wakening  of 
sweet  and  natural  love  between  Earnshaw  and  Cath- 
erine, whom  his  malice  has  robbed,  the  one  of  his 
patrimony  and  the  other  of  her  free  and  happy  girl- 
hood. 

Hawthorne  was  a  greater  artist  than  Emily  Bronte, 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  269 

though  it  is  doubtful  if  he  had  her  keen  sense  of  the 
sweep  and  play  of  passion.  Indeed  he  may  almost 
be  said  to  begin  where  she  leaves  off,  since  he  usu- 
ally deals  with  the  fruit  and  consequence  of  passion. 
The  Bronte  world  is  at  least  well  defined.  It  is  artic- 
ulate even  though  the  roar  of  storm,  oaths,  and  the 
snarl  of  savage  dogs  are  necessary  for  its  utterance. 
Hawthorne  introduces  us  into  the  realm  of  burdened 
conscience,  longing  for  peace  with  groans  that  cannot 
be  uttered.  It  has  become  a  fashion  to  speak  of  his 
world  as  unreal.  Nothing  could  be  further  from  the 
truth.  His  world  is  as  real  as  Defoe's ;  but  his  reali- 
ties are  at  once  too  intimate  and  too  closely  bound 
up  with  personality  to  be  easily  defined.  The  near- 
est and  best-known  things,  like  light,  love,  and  con- 
science, are  often  the  most  truly  mysterious,  because 
they  hurry  us  at  once,  when  we  stop  to  contemplate 
them,  behind  the  veil  of  phenomena,  into  the  world 
of  '  Things  as  they  Are,'  where  as  yet  we  are  not 
quite  at  home.  Mystery  is  an  essential  element  in 
Hawthorne's  work  because  he  is  so  true  to  life.  The 
weird  and  fanciful  may  readily  enough  find  a  play- 
ground there,  for  his  imagination  is  almost  preter- 
naturally  active ;  but  we  do  not  miss,  though  we  may 
sometimes  fail  to  measure,  his  meaning,  and  the 
ways  along  which  he  guides  us  are  the  main  trav- 
elled roads  of  the  soul.  It  is  here  that  we  contrast 
him  with  Poe.  Poe  takes  us  by  the  hand,  leads  us 
into  a  darkened  theatre,  and  there  displays  a  scene 
at  which  we  wonder  and  shudder.  Such  mastery  of 


270:  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

mechanism,  such  intricacy  of  plot,  such  command 
of  dreadful  grotesquerie,  which  is  yet  self-command 
in  that  it  respects  the  borders  of  the  absurd  and 
does  not  trespass  there,  we  feel  that  we  have  never 
seen.  The  cleverness  wherewith  stage  properties  are 
contrived  and  manipulated  passes  our  understand- 
ing. This  magician  is  no  purveyor  of  blood-and- 
thunder  clap-trap ;  he  is  a  man  of  genius  to  whom 
we  do  glad  homage.  But  when  we  catch  our  breath 
it  is  to  remind  ourselves  that  after  all  we  are  watch- 
ing something  upon  the  stage;  though  something 
significant  of  what  life  might  be  if  the  human  will 
were  to  abdicate  its  throne  and  become  subject  to 
the  vagaries  of  mere  circumstance.  It  comforts  us 
to  remember  that  the  human  mind  contrived  them. 
Poe  shows  us  little  that  is  worthy  to  be  called  con- 
duct, since  his  stage  is  ruled  so  tyrannously  by  cir- 
cumstance and  he  moves  so  generally  in  the  sphere 
of  the  physical.  Emily  Bronte  on  the  other  hand 
pictures  conduct,  and  conduct  primarily.  It  seems 
in  one  aspect  almost  impossible  in  the  grotesqueness 
of  its  passion  and  malice;  but  she  compels  our 
hearts  to  whisper  a  warning  against  unbelief,  and 
to  be  mindful  of  their  own  perverse  capacities. 

Hawthorne  takes  little  heed  of  stage  properties ; 
he  hurries  over  the  chapter  of  conduct  upon  which 
the  world  will  sit  in  judgement,  and  then  with  mar- 
vellous art  weaves  an  almost  transparent  veil  of  lim- 
pid speech  through  which  we  look  with  him  into 
the  souls  of  men ;  or  now  and  then  substitutes  for 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  271 

it  a  mirror  in  which  we  see  our  own.  As  Mr.  Brander 
Matthews  has  somewhere  said,  "  Hawthorne's  effects 
are  moral  where  Poe's  are  merely  physical."  Yet 
Poe,  as  I  have  tried  to  indicate,  has  moral  implica- 
tions. Emily  Bronte  lays  her  scene  in  Hell  and 
teaches  all  that  doom  can  teach.  Hawthorne's  sphere 
in  his  most  characteristic  work  is  Purgatory.  "  His 
chief  theme  was  the  play  of  conscience  under  a  sense 
of  sin  and  guilt."  ^  But  whether  in  "  The  Scarlet 
Letter,"  with  its  story  of  Hester's  sin  which,  be- 
cause impossible  of  concealment,  found  half  its  sting 
plucked  away,  as  contrasted  with  Dimmesdale's  seven 
years  of  torment  which  could  only  work  atonement 
through  confession ;  or  in  "  The  House  of  Seven 
Gables,"  with  its  study  of  heredity  and  its  great 
lesson  that  wrong  done  in  one  generation  may  have 
to  be  expiated  and  may  also  be  purged  by  the  work 
of  grace  upon  another ;  or  in  "  The  Marble  Faun," 
with  its  mysterious  suggestions  of  a  human  soul 
brought  to  its  birth  through  the  pangs  of  a  great 
moral  crisis,  —  everywhere  we  are  reminded  that  all 
true  life  is  to  be  expressed  in  the  terms  of  the  spirit. 
The  great  ultimate  question  is  a  moral  one.  Sin  is 
an  intimate  and  a  dreadful  reality,  however  it  be  de- 
fined ;  but  it  is  not  hopeless  so  long  as  men  feel  it. 
Hawthorne  was  no  Churchman ;  but  his  instinct 
as  an  artist  guided  him  at  once  to  the  most  signifi- 
cant things,  not  merely  in  Puritanism  but  in  life ; 
and  they  proved  to  be  the  things  of  religion. 

»  T.  T.  Munger,  Essays  for  the  Day,  p.  109. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE   MASTERS   OF   FICTION.      II 

Among  the  demons  —  and  their  name  is  Legion  — 
who  possess  literary  critics,  none  is  more  ubiquitous 
or  vicious  than  the  Demon  of  Comparison.  His  spe- 
cial province  would  appear  to  be  the  encouragement 
of  partisanship,  prejudice,  and  all  that  makes  against 
catholicity  of  taste.  His  most  facile  tool  is  the  de- 
votee whom  he  can  arm  in  behalf  of  a  favourite 
writer  or  school  with  the  weapons  of  disparagement. 
The  platitude  that  there  is  no  accounting  for  tastes, 
with  its  corollary  that,  within  large  Hmits,  every  man 
is  welcome  to  his  own,  smacks  to  his  ears  of  heresy ; 
while  the  theory  that  life  is  so  varied  and  person- 
ality so  intricate  as  to  justify  an  almost  infinite  va- 
riety of  treatment  is  anathema  itself. 

I  am  led  to  these  rather  trite  observations  by  our 
approach  to  a  group  of  great  men  who  are  paired, 
not  so  often  in  natural  conjunction  as  in  suspicious 
if  not  hostile  contrast.  They  are,  of  course,  Dickens 
and  Thackeray  in  the  realm  of  fiction,  Tennyson 
and  Browning  in  that  of  poetry.  It  may  not  be  un- 
justifiable to  attempt  an  estimate  of  their  compara- 
tive influence  to-day,  or  of  their  prospective  fame  a 
hundred  years  hence.  The  office  of  constructive  and 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  273 

interpretative  criticism  is  of  course  to  characterize 
the  quality  of  each,  and  in  so  doing  some  references 
to  the  work  of  his  fellow  is  inevitable.  But  the  criti- 
cism whose  instinct  is  to  exalt  one  at  the  expense 
of  the  other  immediately  proclaims  its  pettiness  and 
throws  just  suspicion  upon  its  validity.  There  is  a 
note  sometimes  discernible  in  our  praise  of  dogs 
which  challenges  the  bystander  to  speak  of  cats  if 
he  dare ;  while  those  who  respond  quickly  to  the  high 
distinction  and  inscrutable  grace  of  feline  beauty, 
are  too  often  repelled  by  the  dog's  effusiveness. 
Such  fools  are  we,  and  so  slow  of  heart  to  perceive 
the  wealth  of  Being  from  which  Nature  is  ever 
offering  delight  and  enrichment  to  us  in  these 
common  things,  that  it.  is  little  wonder  if  we  re- 
main meagre  and  narrow  in  our  spiritual  apprecia- 
tions. 

We  must  remember  that  men  are  spiritually  in- 
commensurable. We  may  compare  their  bulk  and 
stature;  note  the  general  direction  in  which  their 
choices  trend ;  estimate  in  some  rough  and  fragmen- 
tary way  their  influence  upon  their  fellows :  but  the 
essence  of  personality  escapes  us.  We  lack  its  for- 
mula. What  we  cannot  define,  we  cannot  accurately 
compare ;  and  it  is  probably  true  that  the  things 
we  know  most  intimately  are  most  impossible  of 
exact  definition,  —  personality  and  genius  among 
them.  I  shall  be  reminded  that  this  is  precisely 
the  doctrine  of  Mr.  Squeers :  "  She 's  a  rum  'un  is 
Natur'.  .  .  .  Natur'  is  more  easier  conceived  than 


274  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

described  "  ;  *  and  that  it  affords  a  too  comfortable 
refuge  for  our  ignorance ;  which  is  very  true  if  our 
iofnorance  be  contented  and  slothful.  No  less  cer- 
tainly  does  it  guide  the  feet  of  self-convicted  and 
alert  ignorance  into  the  ways  of  truth,  because  it 
keeps  the  heart  humble  and  stands  as  a  defence 
against  the  proverbial  danger  of  a  little  learning. 

There  was  not  only  abundant  room,  there  was  also 
distinct  need  in  the  early  Victorian  era  for  two 
painters  of  life  with  the  diverse  gifts  of  Dickens  and 
Thackeray.  The  man  who  proclaims  his  allegiance 
to  one  through  disparagement  of  the  other  thereby 
declares  his  own  insensibility  to  certain  aspects  of 
life ;  while  he  who  would  characterize  either  by  any 
epithet  or  label  discovers  how  inadequate  a  phrase 
is  for  the  expression  of  a  man.  We  call  Dickens  an 
idealist,  only  to  be  reminded  upon  the  next  reading 
of  a  chapter  that  his  mind  was  perhaps  the  most  per- 
fect photographic  plate  to  which  the  life  of  middle 
and  lower-class  England  has  ever  been  exposed,  and 

^  I  owe  this  quotation  to  the  Charles  Dickens  of  Mr.  G.  K.  Ches- 
terton, who  uses  it  for  quite  another  purpose  ;  and  I  may  take  this 
opportunity  to  express  my  further  indebtedness  to  Mr.  Chesterton 
for  some  light,  much  amusement,  and  considerable  vexation.  Study- 
ing a  serious  theme  with  him  is  a  little  like  viewing  a  landscape  by 
the  aid  of  a  boy's  fireworks.  The  occasional  rocket  is  not  only  mem- 
orable in  itself,  but  really  illuminates  the  scene  ;  the  intervening 
squibs  are  numerous  and  distracting.  They  splutter  merrily,  but  do 
little  to  further  the  main  purpose.  Or,  to  change  the  figure  for  a 
worthier,  Mr.  Chesterton  seems  to  me  to  be,  like  Ruskin,  an  enter- 
taining companion  if  one  know  the  way,  but  an  uncertain  guide.  His 
characterization  of  Dickens  is  undeniably  clever,  sometimes  very 
penetrating,  and  quite  as  often  a  little  perverse. 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  275 

that  the  impression  has  been  indelibly  fixed.  One 
is  tempted  to  think  that  there  was  scarce  a  cruet- 
stand  in  a  humble  English  cupboard  that  Dickens 
did  not  know.  He  saw  and  makes  us  see  the  very 
stains  and  crumbs  upon  the  table  in  dingy  inn-par- 
lours where  we  must  dine  with  him.  Indeed  this 
mastery  of  dinginess  which  our  modern  realists  covet 
so  was  a  chief  characteristic  of  his.  No  one,  not 
even  Mr.  Gissing,  has  seemed  to  be  more  at  home 
amid  the  dust  and  squalor  of  London.  Yet  in  one 
respect  Dickens,  like  Thackeray,  though  perhaps  in 
an  even  higher  degree,  differentiates  himself  from 
the  ^  realist '  of  the  modern  school.  His  hand  refused 
to  be  permanently  subdued  to  the  hue  of  that  in 
which  it  wrought.  He  was  incorrigibly  given  to  let- 
ting his  dust  dance  sometimes  in  a  sunbeam ;  and 
he  insisted  to  the  end  that  even  puddles  might  re- 
flect the  stars.  Thackeray  is  as  glibly  assigned  to  the 
ranks  of  the  ^  realists,'  and  has  of  course  his  place 
there ;  but  it  would  be  better  for  modern  '  realism ' 
if  it  were  content  to  measure  itself  by  its  master's 
standard  instead  of  compelling  him  to  reflect  its  own 
theories.  Thackeray  is  relentless  in  pursuit  and  ex- 
posure of  selfish  motive ;  but  he  is  as  certainly  a 
preacher  of  the  possibility  and  the  need  of  a  better 
basis  for  Kfe  in  the  soul  and  in  the  world  than  self- 
ishness can  offer ;  as  must  appear  to  any  unpreju- 
diced reader  who  will  follow  him  from  the  opening 
chapter  of  "  Catherine "  to  the  conclusion  of  the 
^'  Adventures  of  Philip."  Indeed  there  are  times,  as 


276  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  these  very  opening  scenes  of  ^^  Catherine/'  before 
his  art  had  perfected  itself,  when  his  satire  becomes 
so  homiletic  as  to  affect  us  a  Httle  hke  the  too  ex- 
plicit moral  of  a  fable.  It  was  needed,  however,  in 
that  day  of  "  Paul  Clifford  "  and  the  rascal-hero's 
vogue,  and  one  reason  why  it  seems  superfluous  now 
is  that  its  work  was  done  so  well. 

The  appeal  of  religion  to  Dickens  was  inevitable; 
and  it  was  quite  as  inevitable  that  his  response 
should  be  somewhat  unconventional.  He  might  have 
characterized  it  as  the  answer  of  his  heart  to  the 
all-inclusive  humanity  and  charity  of  Christ.  Of  the 
dogmatic  formulas  of  Christianity  he  made  small 
account,  and  of  the  Christian  Church  as  a  great 
development  in  history  he  was  half-oblivious.  Yet 
radical  though  he  liked  to  think  himself,  he  was  re- 
sponsive to  the  Church  of  England  and  duly  con- 
temptuous of  Dissenters.  The  grey  beauty  of  old 
church  fabrics  touched  his  feeling  for  the  romantic, 
and  the  music  of  the  ritual  found  ready  answer 
in  his  own  highly  developed,  though  too  little 
chastened  rhetorical  sense.  In  his  somewhat  elab- 
orate will  he  exhorted  his  children  to  pattern  their 
lives  upon  the  precepts  of  the  Gospel,  and  it  will 
be  remembered  that,  with  characteristic  assurance, 
he  once  edited  the  New  Testament  for  their  use. 

In  his  novels,  however,  what  may  be  roughly  called 
organized  religion  plays  no  very  large  part.  Minis- 
ters of  religion  rarely  appear  conspicuously,  unless 
it  be  in  caricature,  as  in  the  cases  of  Stiggins  and 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  277 

Chadband.  Mr.  Crisparkle  in  "  Edwin  Drood  "  is 
meant  to  appeal  to  the  reader  as  a  Christian  and  a 
gentleman.  Opinions  differ  as  to  his  success,  and, 
since  the  book  in  which  he  figures  remains  a  frag- 
ment, no  especial  significance  attaches  to  his  charac- 
ter. Toward  all  asceticism  this  great  apostle  of  meat, 
drink,  and  good  comradeship  was,  of  course,  consti- 
tutionally unsympathetic.  He  was  preeminently  a 
man  of  crowds  and  cities.  The  bustle  of  the  streets 
and  the  stimulus  of  their  restlessness  were  needful 
conditions,  he  thought,  to  his  own  best  work ;  and 
he  was  probably  right.  Life,  in  his  view  of  it,  was 
the  life  of  multitudes ;  yet  no  student  of  the  mass, 
if,  indeed,  student  be  not  too  cold  and  detached  a 
word  to  use  of  him,  was  ever  more  conscious  of  the 
individual  or  quicker  to  catch  and  fix  his  character- 
istics. Here  we  approach  the  key  to  such  religious 
significance  as  the  work  of  Dickens  possesses. 

He  was  eminently,  almost  divinely,  humane.  A 
great  creator,  like  his  predecessor,  Scott,  and  his 
contemporary,  Thackeray,  he  may  have  shown  less 
than  they  of  the  creative  patience  which  permits 
wheat  and  tares  to  approach  the  harvest  undisturbed ; 
but  he  entered  into  his  creatures'  life  of  good  or  ill 
with  well-nigh  unexampled  self -abandon.  Thus  and 
thus  only  can  we  account  for  the  inevitable  cogency 
of  his  appeal  upon  the  one  hand,  and  for  his  too  fre- 
quent extravagance  upon  the  other.  So  sane  a  critic 
as  Mr.  P.  E.  More  has  said  that,  despite  his  own  ex- 
perience of  poverty,  Dickens  viewed  the  poor  man 


278  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

from  a  superior  standpoint  and  treated  him  from  the 
outside,  not,  like  George  Gissing,  as  though  poverty 
were  bone  of  his  bone  and  flesh  of  his  flesh.  There 
is  an  element  of  truth  in  this,  but  I  incline  to  think 
it  truer  that  Dickens  refused  to  feel  that  even  pov- 
erty was  a  sufficiently  masterful  circumstance  per- 
manently to  rule  a  man's  character.  The  Gissings  ^ 
and  Gorkys  are  after  all  the  real  materialists  —  the 
true  devotees  of  the  great  god  Circumstance.  In 
depicting  the  poor  they  too  often  cease  to  paint 
men ;  and  Mr.  Chesterton  has  very  justly  pointed 
the  contrast  by  his  discovery  in  it  of  one  large  ele- 
ment of  Dickens's  power  not  only  to  charm  two  gen- 
erations of  readers,  but  to  effect  practical  reforms. 
Both  Gissing  and  Dickens,  he  says,  "  agreed  that 
the  souls  of  the  people  were  in  a  kind  of  prison. 
But  Gissing  said  that  the  prison  was  full  of  dead 
souls.  Dickens  said  that  the  prison  was  full  of  liv- 
ing souls.  And  the  fiery  cavalcade  of  rescuers  felt 
that  they  had  not  come  too  late."  ^  This  humanity 
displays  two  characteristics  that  align  Dickens  with 
the  deeper  religious  forces  of  his  age.  It  shows  a 
third  which  is  at  once  more  conventional  and  more 
*  practical.'  The  first  two  I  shall  call  his  childlike- 
ness  and  his  essential  purity  \  the  last,  his  reform- 
ing purpose. 

The  rather  supercilious  admission  that  Sir  Walter 

*  This  is  true  of  Gissing  only  in  his  occasional  and  lesser  aspect. 
There  is  a  greater  side,  to  which  I  try  to  do  justice  in  a  later  chapter. 
2  G.  K.  Chesterton,  Charles  Dickens,  pp.  279-280. 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  279 

Scott  will  for  some  time  continue  to  amuse  young 
people  has  already  been  noted.  In  something  the 
same  tone  we  are  reminded  from  time  to  time  of 
the  appeal  which  Dickens  makes  to  childhood.  The 
charge,  if  charge  it  be,  is  true.  The  delight  with 
which  intelligent  children  read  their  Dickens  is 
unique ;  they  feel  his  power ;  they  see  eye  to  eye  with 
him;  the  fountain  of  their  ready  tears  responds  alike 
to  his  humour  and  his  pathos.  They  do  not  stop 
to  ask  how  it  is  done,  because  they  do  not  care. 
Upon  their  return  to  him  in  later  life  the  quality  of 
this  appeal  is  found  to  be  somewhat  changed.  If  the 
spirit  of  inquiry  into  the  mechanism  of  things  be 
dominant  in  them,  they  are  likely  to  be  oppressed 
by  the  glaring  lapses  of  his  art.  Unless  they  retain 
something  of  a  child's  capacity  to  find  enjoyment 
in  an  episode  or  in  a  character,  much  of  his  charm 
must  have  fled.  But  over  those  whose  eyes  are  still 
open  to  the  wonder  of  common  life  he  rules  as  of 
old  ;  though  less  by  reason  of  his  story,  whose  faulti- 
ness  is  now  too  patent,  than  by  his  extraordinary 
capacity  to  catch  some  impulse  of  the  heart,  some 
episode  in  experience,  or  some  strongly  individual 
trait  of  character,  and  not  only  to  incarnate  it  but 
to  endow  it  with  something  of  the  appeal  and  power 
of  endless  life. 

Take  a  character — or  the  shadow  of  a  character 
—  like  Mr.  F.'s  Aunt.  Why  is  she  immortal?  Why 
do  we  feel  a  great  pity  stirring  within  us  for  the 
occasional  wretch  who  sees  in  her  nothingr  but  an 


280  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

irrelevant  parrot?  I  am  less  disposed  to  answer  the 
question  than  to  remind  my  reader  of  the  fact.  If 
he  will  tell  me  why  a  very  clever  boy  of  my  acquaint- 
ance once  lifted  his  hand  in  the  school-room  to  at- 
tract his  teacher's  eye,  and  on  being  asked  what  he 
wanted  simply  answered,  "  There 's  milestones  on  the 
Dover  road,"  we  shall  perhaps  be  upon  the  trail  of 
a  reason.  I  knew  this  boy  after  he  had  come  up  to 
the  University  and  developed  marked  mathematical 
ability.  Few  men  of  his  day  in  college  showed 
greater  capacity  for  consecutive  thought ;  none  per- 
haps had  higher  respect  for  reason  and  its  exercise ; 
none  certainly  felt  more  keenly  the  appeal  of  this 
inspired  phantom  of  Dickens's  brain,  or  would  have 
known  a  more  genuine  delight  had  a  stranger  stopped 
him  on  the  street  to  remark,  "When  we  lived  at 
Henley,  Barnes's  gander  was  stole  by  tinkers." 

So  I  chanced  once  to  see  an  undertaker  making 
his  final  preparations  for  a  funeral  service  which 
was  to  be  performed  an  hour  or  two  later.  The  body 
of  a  singularly  beautiful  young  girl,  an  only  child, 
arrayed  for  burial,  lay  upon  a  bier  of  somewhat  un- 
usual design  and  of  great  costliness.  The  circum- 
stances of  seemingly  blighted  promise  and  bitter 
loss  were  such  as  might  have  impressed  the  most 
careless.  Even  this  man  of  many  funerals  seemed 
touched  to  more  than  professional  sympathy.  While 
we  were  alone  for  a  few  minutes  I  saw  him  approach 
the  bier,  lay  his  hand  almost  reverently  upon  its 
elaborate  side  and  murmur  more  to  himself  than  to 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  281 

me,  "  Beautiful  thing !  beautiful  thing ! "  The  note 
of  subdued  ecstasy  was  real,  and  I  knew  that  I  be- 
held a  reincarnation  of  Mr.  Mould.  It  is  safe  to  say- 
that  every  genuinely  interested  observer  of  life  who 
is  glad  to  take  account  not  merely  of  its  background 
of  mystery,  its  interplay  of  good  and  evil  passion, 
and  its  ultimate  subjection  to  law,  but  also  of  its 
surface  incongruities  and  irrelevancies,  will  find  his 
experiences  prefigured  by  Dickens  more  often  than 
by  any  other  master  of  English  speech.  In  this  re- 
spect he  is  the  supreme  realist,  and  one  reason  why 
children  respond  so  quickly  to  him  is  that  he  pos- 
sesses precisely  their  faculty  for  seizing  quickly  upon 
salient  features  of  the  people  he  sees  and  focussing 
attention  upon  them.  Let  it  be  granted  that  these 
are  not  always  the  most  significant  features  and  that 
he  sometimes  errs  in  over-emphasizing  them ;  as,  for 
instance,  when  he  makes  far  too  much  in  "  Great 
Expectations"  of  Jaggers's  habitual  biting  of  his 
big  forefinger.  None  the  less  this  is  a  feature  of  his 
intense  realization  of  his  world,  where  he  lives  with 
all  a  child's  exuberance  of  vitality. 

This  same  characteristic  explains  to  a  considerable 
degree  the  lack  of  restraint  in  his  pathos.  No  apol- 
ogy is  to  be  made  for  the  bad  blank  verse  in  which 
he  sings  the  elegies  of  little  Nell  or  Paul  Dombey ; 
any  more  than  it  is  to  be  denied  that  elements  of 
genuine  pathos  appear  in  both  cases.  The  difficulty 
is  that,  child-fashion,  he  permits  his  sense  of  tears 
to  feed  upon  itself  until  the  exaggeration  repels  us. 


282  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Even  this  exaggeration,  however,  although  all  too 
often  it  crosses  the  borders  of  melodrama,  and  though 
Dickens  himself,  it  is  to  be  feared,  gave  melodra- 
matic emphasis  to  it  in  his  readings,  contains  a  posi- 
tive and  vital  element.  Its  naivete  consists  in  a  love 
of  thorough-going  experience.  Grief  is  not  hinted 
at ;  it  is  brought  home  to  the  heart,  enlarged  upon 
and  made  much  of  with  all  a  child's  unreserve  and 
lack  of  sense  of  proportion.  Hence  it  is  that  the 
pathos  of  Dickens  which  makes  appeal  to  adults, 
most  often  appears  in  such  passages  as  that  in 
"  Great  Expectations"  which  shows  Pip  spelling  out 
the  inscriptions  upon  the  tomb-stones  of  his  parents, 
and  building  upon  their  conjectured  meanings  his 
childish  theories  of  life,  death,  and  loneliness ;  or 
in  the  account  of  David  Copperfield's  sense  of  min- 
gled grief  and  importance  after  being  told  of  his 
mother's  death. 

The  essential  cleanness  of  Dickens  needs  but  a 
passing  reference,  because  it  is  so  obvious.  He 
knew  life  in  its  vicious  and  criminal  aspects  well 
enough ;  in  Oliver  Twist  his  chief  object  was  to  de- 
pict it,  partly  perhaps  in  protest  against  the  prevail- 
ing vogue  of  the  rogue-novel,  but  more  out  of  sym- 
pathy with  unfortunates  of  Oliver's  class.  Here  the 
work-house  boy,  the  blundering  and  heartless  parish 
authorities,  the  pickpocket,  the  burglar,  and  the  har- 
lot appear  for  what  they  are;  yet,  as  in  the  case  of 
the  betrayal  of  Em'ly,  or  the  sin  of  Lady  Dedlock, 
there  is  a  certain  dignity  of  restraint  about  it  all 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  283 

which  is  the  more  effective  because  it  is  natural  to 
the  point  of  unconsciousness.  Dickens  never  feared 
to  call  a  spade  a  spade,  —  he  was  as  far  as  man  might 
be  from  prudishness ;  coarseness,  indeed,  was  by  no 
means  impossible  to  him, — but  in  the  essentials  and 
fundamentals  of  decency  he  was  sound.  Nowhere 
do  we  find  him  guilty  of  that  Pharisaism  which  in 
the  name  of  art  makes  its  bid  for  popularity  by  pan- 
dering to  unworthy  curiosity. 

He  had  an  appetite  for  life  and  its  story  which 
sometimes  betrayed  him  into  a  sort  of  artistic  glut- 
tony, but  in  itself  the  appetite  was  wholesome  ;  for 
that  perversion  of  faculty  which  we  have  come  to 
call  decadent  he  had  no  taste  at  all.  Recognizing 
sin  and  sorrow  for  what  they  were,  he  exaggerated 
the  place  of  neither,  though  doubtless  over-elaborat- 
ing his  treatment  of  the  latter ;  but  even  were  it  true 
that  he  sometimes  "  wallowed  naked  in  the  pa- 
thetic," the  question  would  still  remain  as  to  whether 
this  unseemliness  be  not  preferable,  from  the  stand- 
point both  of  art  and  health,  to  the  mud-bath  of 
frenetic  passion  which  so  many  of  the  later  realists 
have  offered  to  us. 

This  is  not  the  place  to  discuss  the  artistic  status 
of  the  novel  with  a  purpose ;  nor  is  it  needful  to  say 
much  about  Dickens  as  a  practical  reformer ;  suffice 
it  to  remark  that  the  highest  fiction  will  always  dif- 
ferentiate itself  from  the  mere  essay  in  ^  local  col- 
our,' not  only  by  depicting  but  by  interpreting  life, 
precisely  as  portrait-painting  will  refuse  to  be  con- 


284  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tent  with  the  exact  but  momentary  transcript  which 
the  camera  supphes  ;  and  wherever  the  element  of 
interpretation  appears  there  the  idea  of  purpose  is 
at  least  implied.  Only  where  this  idea  becomes  so 
masterful  as  to  dominate  the  whole  work,  dictating 
its  scheme,  arbitrarily  selecting  its  material,  and  de- 
termining beforehand  its  result,  does  it  prove  to  be 
an  artistic  blemish.  In  "  Hard  Times  "  Dickens  per- 
mits this  to  happen  in  such  degree  as  to  make  a 
tract  of  what  should  have  been  a  novel,  with  the 
result  that  the  book  is  perhaps  the  least  readable 
of  any  that  he  wrote.  But  generally  speaking  the 
moral  of  his  work  is  vital  rather  than  homiletic :  it 
issues  naturally  from  the  picture  of  life  as  a  whole, 
instead  of  appearing  as  an  ulterior  motive ;  and 
though  often  frankly  acknowledged,  it  is  rarely  per- 
mitted to  tyrannize  over  the  situation  to  the  exclu- 
sion of  humane  and  common  charity.  "  Nicholas 
Nickleby"  was  fatal  to  some  of  the  cheap  York- 
shire schools.  But  Dickens  was  not  upon  a  mere  cru- 
sade ;  he  could  stop  to  paint  the  most  delectable  of 
madmen  tossing  his  tribute  of  vegetable  marrows 
to  Mrs.  Nickleby  over  the  garden  wall.  "Martin 
Chuzzlewit "  found  a  fair  target  for  satire  in  the 
hypocrisy  of  British  Philistinism  and  the  bombastic 
crudity  of  life  in  America ;  but  it  also  gave  us  in 
Sarah  Gamp  the  sister  of  Falstaff.  "  Dombey  and 
Son"  contains  a  sermon  —  not  too  skilfully  devel- 
oped —  against  self-centred  pride ;  but  its  faults  in 
construction  are  all  forgiven  as  soon  as  those  im- 


THE  MASTERS   OF  FICTION  285 

mortal  mariuers,  Cap'n  Cuttle  and  Jack  Bunsby, 
with  the  redoubtable  MacStinger,  lift  up  their  voices 
in  its  cause.  The  hypercritical  tell  us  that  these 
creatures  are  out  of  character  and  impossible  ;  to 
which  the  answer  is  ready  that  Mrs.  MacStinger 
haling  her  offending  offspring  into  another  room, 
whence  speedily  issue  "sounds  as  of  applause,"  is 
as  perfect  an  incarnation  of  one  sort  of  parental 
discipline  as  Cuttle  and  Bunsby  are  of  a  correspond- 
ing type  of  marine  simplicity.  "  Bleak  House  "  and 
"  Little  Dorrit "  dealt  a  memorable  blow  at  Circum- 
locution Offices  and  the  injustice  for  which  the 
Marshalsea  stood  ;  they  pass,  but  Mr.  F.'s  Aunt  and 
the  Milestones  on  the  Dover  Eoad  abide. 

These  are  in  one  sense  only  incidental  features 
of  Dickens's  work;  but,  like  the  postscripts  and 
parentheses  in  our  letters,  they  contain  some  of  his 
most  significant  matter.  In  them  there  speaks  his 
keen  sense  of  both  the  variety  and  the  puzzle  of 
existence,  chastened  and  sweetened  by  an  unwaver- 
ing faith  that  he  who  plays  the  man  will  ultimately 
justify  his  life  to  himself  and  to  the  world.  He 
gives  added  illustration  to  the  fundamentals  of 
Christ's  Gospel.  The  law  of  love,  unpretentiously 
applied,  fits  man's  need  like  wholesome  bread. 
After  making  every  allowance  for  the  artistic 
shortcomings  of  such  figures  as  the  Cheerybles, 
the  converted  Scrooge,  or  Joe  Gargery,  —  though 
I  am  personally  sorry  for  the  critic  who  can  find 
fault  with  Joe,  —  the  fact  remains  that  they  ex- 


286  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

emplify  in  unmistakable  fashion  the  great  princi- 
ples of  the  art  of  living  together.  They  illustrate 
the  spirit  of  mutual  service ;  and  it  is  to  be  noted 
that  their  very  faults  are  the  faults  of  exuberant 
vitality.  They,  like  most  of  Dickens's  characters, 
are  so  full  of  life  as  occasionally  to  run  over; 
whatever  else  may  be  charged  to  their  account, 
they  are  not  meagre.  Never  did  a  man  stretch  out 
both  hands  to  the  fire  of  life  with  greater  zest; 
and  so  far  from  elbowing  less  happily  situated 
mortals  away,  probably  no  man  of  his  century  did 
more  to  extend  the  hearth  and  the  glow.  The 
practical  beneficence  of  his  work  is  written  upon 
the  pages  of  our  statute  books  and  in  the  increased 
humanity  of  our  treatment  of  children  and  the 
poor;  his  essential  cleanness  of  purpose  and  method 
in  dealing  with  vice  or  crime  shines  out  in  refresh- 
ing contrast  to  the  theory  that,  in  order  to  abate 
a  nuisance,  one  must  first  wallow  in  it;  and  the 
freshness  of  his  approach  to  life,  which  age  might 
temper  but  could  not  stale,  speaks  of  the  heart  of 
a  child  that  beat  in  him.  He  kept  into  manhood's 
estate  and  introduced  into  his  work  a  thousand 
childish  faults;  but  no  less  truly  did  he  first  learn 
and  then  teach  the  fundamental  law  of  the  King- 
dom of  Heaven. 

An  interesting  and  significant  study  might  be 
made  of  Thackeray's  use  of  Scripture  language  in 
his  great  scenes.  Here  for  instance  is  a  paragraph 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  287 

from  the  famous  return  of  Esmond.  Lady  Castle- 
wood  speaks. 

"  ^  And  to-day,  Henry,  in  the  anthem,  when-  they 
sang  it,  "  When  the  Lord  turned  the  captivity  of 
Zion,  we  were  like  them  that  dream,"  I  thought, 
yes,  like  them  that  dream  —  them  that  dream. 
And  then  it  went,  "  They  that  sow  in  tears  shall 
reap  in  joy ;  and  he  that  goeth  forth  and  weepeth 
shall  doubtless  come  again  with  rejoicing,  bringing 
his  sheaves  with  him" ;  I  looked  up  from  the  book 
and  saw  you.  I  was  not  surprised  when  I  saw  you. 
I  knew  you  would  come,  my  dear,  and  saw  the  gold 
sunshine  round  your  head.' 

"  She  smiled  an  almost  wild  smile  as  she  looked 
up  at  him.  The  moon  was  up  by  this  time,  glitter- 
ing keen  in  the  frosty  sky.  He  could  see,  for  the 
first  time  now  clearly,  her  sweet  careworn  face. 

"^Do  you  know  what  day  it  is?'  she  continued. 
^It  is  the  29th  of  December — it  is  your  birthday! 
But  last  year  we  did  not  drink  it — no,  no.  My 
lord  was  cold,  and  my  Harry  was  likely  to  die ;  and 
my  brain  was  in  a  fever;  and  we  had  no  wine. 
But  now  —  now  you  are  come  again,  bringing  your 
sheaves  with  you,  my  dear.'  She  burst  into  a  wild 
flood  of  weeping  as  she  spoke:  she  laughed  and 
sobbed  on  the  young  man's  heart,  crying  out 
wildly,  ^Bringing  your  sheaves  with  you — your 
sheaves  with  you ! '" 

A  moving  passage,  and  composed  with  an  art 
worthy  of  the  deep  feeling  which  animated  it.  The 
language  in  its  grace  and  simplicity  harmonizes 
with  the  words  of  the  Psalter,  which,  in  their  turn, 


288  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

express  as  no  other  speech  has  ever  been  able  to 
do  the  autumn  mingling  of  joy  and  tears  at  the 
close  of  a  great  chapter  in  the  souFs  experience. 
It  is  moreover  a  passage  to  be  earnestly  com- 
mended to  such  as  are  tempted  to  call  Thackeray 
a  cynic;  for  it  is  eminently  characteristic  of  his 
conclusions  at  the  end  of  the  play,  and  scarcely 
less  of  the  means  which  he  uses  to  present  and 
define  the  players.  This  indebtedness  of  his  to  the 
language  of  religion  is  not  generally  appreciated, 
though  but  a  moment's  thought  is  needed  to  show 
how  great  it  was.  The  "Adventures  of  Philip  on 
His  Way  through  the  World,"  for  instance,  is  in 
its  very  title  an  echo  of  the  Parable  of  the  Good 
Samaritan,  since  it  is  to  show  "Who  robbed  him, 
Who  helped  him,  and  Who  passed  him  by" ;  and 
the  preacher  is  always  recurring  to  his  text,  as 
for  instance  in  the  character  of  the  lodging-house 
keeper,  Madame  Smolensk,  just  returned  from 
bearing  Charlotte's  message  to  the  despairing  hero. 

"  How  brisk  she  is !  How  good-natured !  How  she 
smiles!  How  she  speaks  to  all  her  company,  and 
carves  for  her  guests !  You  do  not  suppose  she  has 
no  griefs  and  cares  of  her  own?  You  know  bet- 
ter. I  dare  say  she  is  thinking  of  her  creditors;  of 
her  poverty ;  of  that  accepted  bill  which  will  come 
due  next  week,  and  so  forth.  The  Samaritan  who 
rescues  you,  most  likely,  has  been  robbed  and  has 
bled  in  his  day,  and  it  is  a  wounded  arm  that 
bandages  yours  when  bleeding."  ^ 

*  Adventures  of  Philip,  part  ii,  chap.  ii. 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  289 

These  illustrations  are  characteristic  rather  than 
exceptional.  The  title  of  "Vanity  Fair"  is  taken 
from  the  most  widely  read  religious  volume  in 
English  next  to  the  Bible,  while  its  motto  and  re- 
frain is  from  the  Bible  itself.  "  Vanity  of  vani- 
ties/' cries  this  modern  preacher  as  insistently  as 
Koheleth  of  old.  But  they  are  a  short-sighted  crew 
who  see  in  his  use  of  the  text  nothing  but  Kohe- 
leth's  cynicism.  As  though  he  foresaw  the  public's 
blindness,  Thackeray  explicitly  confessed  his  apos- 
tolic purpose  to  his  mother:  "  What  I  want  is  to 
make  a  set  of  people  living  without  God  in  the 
world  (only  that  is  a  cant  phrase)."  How  well  he 
succeeded  let  Lord  Steyne,  Sir  Pitt  Crawley,  poor 
stupid  Jos  Sedley,  old  Major  Pendennis,  and  the 
immortal  Becky  answer  in  their  different  ways.  No 
unfair  advantage  of  his  words  is  taken  in  saying 
that  Thackeray's  aim  was  to  translate  the  Apostle's 
statement  into  terms  of  Stuart  and  Georgian  Eng- 
lish, and  to  show  that  to  be  without  God  was  to 
be  without  hope  in  the  eighteenth  or  nineteenth 
century  as  truly  as  in  the  first.  In  the  case  of 
"Catherine,"  as  I  have  already  indicated,  he  pro- 
claimed this  as  from  a  pulpit ;  in  "  Vanity  Fair," 
when  his  art  had  perfected  itself,  he  was  better 
content  to  let  it  remain  implicit ;  but  after  such  a 
manner  as  to  make  it  bone  of  his  history's  bone 
and  flesh  of  its  flesh.  In  their  different  ways,  Pen- 
dennis praying  by  his  dying  mother,  Colonel  New- 
come  with  his  memorable  Adsum,  and  old  Baron- 


290  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ess  Bernstein,  in  whom  one  can  just  discern  the 
splendid  Beatrix  of  other  days,  take  up  the  parable 
and  point  the  inevitable  moral. 

But  I  incline  to  believe  that  Thackeray's  debt  to 
religion  and  the  religious  significance  of  his  work 
are  both  to  be  sought  a  little  deeper  beneath  the 
surface,  rich  though  the  surface  be.  He  is  perhaps 
the  most  truly  epic  of  English  prose-writers  and 
therefore  the  most  sincerely  pathetic.  To  call  him 
a  cynic  is  so  completely  to  miss  his  secret  that  no 
time  need  be  wasted  in  exposing  the  shallowness 
of  such  criticism.  He  was  as  cynical  as  a  boy  who 
under  stress  of  strong  emotion  must  needs  assume 
a  nonchalant  manner  or  else  give  way  to  tears. 
Like  most  men  of  deep  feeling,  he  shrank  from  its 
display  lest  it  might  master  and  make  a  spectacle 
of  him.  But  none  the  less,  through  what  I  have 
termed  the  epic  quality  in  his  picture  of  life,  his 
feeling  calls  to  ours  as  deep  to  deep. 

There  is  an  almost  Homeric,  certainly  a  Yirgilian, 
amplitude  to  his  art.  Without  crowding  his  canvas 
or  his  stage  with  characters  as  Dickens  sometimes 
does,  he  represents  them  in  the  scope  and  range  of 
their  lives  rather  than  in  the  light  of  an  episode  or 
a  series  of  episodes.  If  they  are  sowing  he  looks 
upon  them  with  the  eye  of  a  painter  of  harvests. 
Through  all  the  follies  of  Pendennis  one  seems  to 
catch  glimpses  of  the  day  when  he  shall  kneel  in 
tears  by  his  mother's  bedside.  The  cleverness  of 
Becky  is  equal  to   most  of  life's  exigencies,  but 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  291 

it  cannot  avail  to  fend  off  the  time  when  her  angry 
husband  shall  strip  her  of  her  jewels  and  fling 
them  in  Lord  Steyne*s  face.  The  jaded  Bern- 
stein eyes  leer  at  us  now  and  then  behind  the  glo- 
rious front  of  Beatrix,  as  though  they  were  the 
ultimate  reality  and  the  beauty  but  a  mask.  The 
selfishness  and  treachery  of  Catherine  are  evidently 
busy  in  preparation  for  the  night  of  terror  when 
she  shall  be  confronted  by  the  countenance  of  her 
murdered  husband ;  while  the  pride  and  passion  of 
Philip  move  toward  a  final  reckoning  with  life  which 
shall  bring  him  to  his  knees  in  thanksgiving  for  a 
very  simple  act  of  kindness,  and  show  him  to  be  a 
truer  man  in  his  humility  than  he  had  been  in  his 
self-confidence. 

It  is  in  the  light  of  such  judgements  that  the  cre- 
ator sees  his  creatures,  and  it  is  toward  such  issues 
that  their  careers  inevitably  move  ;  meanwhile,  if  he 
call  them  puppets  and  picture  two  children  packing 
them  away  at  the  story's  end  because  the  play  is 
played  out,*  that  is  only  his  way  of  half  conceaKng 
a  poignant  sense  of  the  certain  mystery  and  the  seem- 
ing fatuity  of  much  that  men  busy  themselves  about 
under  the  impression  that  it  is  life.  How  far  he  was 
from  regarding  his  greater  characters  as  puppets 
is  evidenced  by  such  a  meeting  as  that  with  Lowell 
when  he  was  completing  the  Newcomes. 

"  ^  Come  into  Evans's,'  said  he,  ^  and  I  '11  tell  you 
all  about  it.    /  have  killed  the  ColoneL^    So  they 

*  Cf .  Thackeray's  tailpiece  to  .Vanity  Fair. 


292  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

walked  in  [says  Mr.  F.  H.  Underwood] ,  and  took  a 
table  in  a  remote  corner,  and  then  Thackeray,  draw- 
ing the  fresh  sheets  of  MS.  from  his  breast  pocket, 
read  through  that  exquisitely  touching  chapter  which 
records  the  death  of  Colonel  Newcome.  When  he 
came  to  the  final  Adsum,  the  tears  which  had  been 
swelling  his  lids  for  some  time  trickled  down  his  face, 
and  the  last  word  was  almost  an  inarticulate  sob."^ 

I  hesitate  to  set  this  down  for  fear  some  ill-advised 
reader  may  leap  to  the  conclusion  that  Thackeray 
is  then  to  be  numbered  among  the  sentimentalists. 
He  was  as  far  from  sentimentality  as  from  cynicism : 
but  he  did  feel  to  the  full  the  pathos  of  common 
life ;  and  the  action  of  his  greater  novels  always  de- 
mands time  enough  to  distinguish  the  end  of  an 
experience  from  its  beginning.  Both  the  humour 
and  pathos  of  Dickens  are  lush  and  full  of  sap  ;  the 
exuberance  of  May  and  June  is  in  them  and  they 
infect  us  with  the  exhilaration  of  early  summer. 
Thackeray's  season  is  rather  a  harvest  time  which 
tells  us  that  not  every  bud  of  the  expectant  spring 
has  come  to  fruition.  His  story  is  told  from  the 
standpoint  of  its  last  chapter ;  sometimes,  we  might 
almost  say,  from  the  last  chapter  of  a  sequel,  so  well 
did  he  love  to  carry  his  characters  on  through  the 
term  of  their  natural  lives.  A  realist  indeed  he  was, 
as  Professor  Cross  has  happily  called  him,  a  "  real- 
ist of  the  Spirit,"  who  dwells  much  upon  the  great 
human  experiences  of  "pardon,  renunciation,  for- 

*  Article  on  J.  R.  Lowell,  Harper^ s  Magazine ^  vol.  xii,  pp.  265-266. 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  293 

giveness,  reconciliatioiij  disinterested  friendship, 
and  the  separation  of  parents  and  children  by  sea 
and  death  ;  and  bows  his  head  in  awe  before  the  in- 
explicable course  of  events  and  the  mysteries  of  life 
and  death."  *  The  conclusion  of  the  matter  is  that 
amid  all  the  selfishness,  meanness,  and  contradiction 
of  life,  as  well  as  in  its  mystery,  faith,  hope,  and  love 
abide ;  and  that  the  greatest  of  these  is  love.^ 

One  great  name  remains  to  be  dealt  with  in  this 
chapter.  But  before  I  pass  on  to  George  Eliot  con- 
fession must  needs  be  made  of  the  embarrassment 
of  riches  occasioned  by  the  memory  of  Disraeli, 
Bulwer-Lytton,  Mrs.  Gaskell,  Charles  and  Henry 
Kingsley,  Charles  Reade,  and  Anthony  Trollope ; 
to  whose  names  should  perhaps  be  added  that  of 
Mrs.  Beecher  Stowe.  It  has  become  the  fashion  in 
certain  quarters  to  treat  this  mid-century  fiction 

»  W.  L.  Cross,  The  Development  of  the  English  Novely  p.  206. 

'  Had  space  sufficed,  I  should  have  tried  to  say  something  of 
Thackeray's  illustrations  and  the  influence  that  they  have  had  in 
fostering  the  popular  notion  of  his  cynicism.  Admirably  fitted  as  his 
drawings  are  to  the  purposes  of  burlesque,  they  unquestionably  de- 
tract from  the  consistency  of  his  greater  works.  Almost  always  sane 
and  self-restrained  in  the  use  of  his  pen,  he  can  out-Dickens  Dick- 
ens in  extravagance  when  he  takes  his  pencil.  One  would  not  of 
course  lightly  give  up  the  tailpiece  to  Vanity  Fair^  or  "  Venus  pre- 
paring the  Arms  of  Mars  "  ;  and  if  Thackeray  had  confined  himself 
to  depicting  the  charms  of  Peggy  O'Dowd  all  might  have  been 
well;  but  the  caricatures  —  for  they  are  nothing  more  —  of  Beatrix, 
Laura,  and  even  Becky  Sharp,  are  a  heavy  price  to  pay  for  them. 
The  late  Mr.  Shorthouse  has  dealt  with  the  matter  fairly  though  by 
no  means  exhaustively,  in  his  article  entitled  "  The  Humourous  in 
Literature,"  Macmillan's  Magazine,  vol.  xlvii. 


^94  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

cavalierly,  and  to  assume  that  we  have  outgrown  it. 
Assumption  is  a  necessity  if  we  are  to  be  supercili- 
ous, since  proof  is,  and  is  likely  to  remain,  wanting. 
The  group  is  a  very  notable  one  and  contains  some 
figures  of  real  significance  to  our  present  purpose ; 
a  fact  which  makes  it  the  more  difficult  to  accord 
them  but  a  paragraph  apiece.  Bulwer-Lytton  and 
Disraeli,  to  be  sure,  do  not  greatly  concern  us; 
though  any  one  who  will  blow  the  dust  from  "  Pel- 
ham"  may  discern  at  a  glance  one  characteristic 
which  distinguishes  the  earlier  work  of  its  author 
from  that  of  his  greater  contemporaries  and  assigns 
it  at  once  to  an  inferior  rank.  The  hero  tells  his 
story  in  two  sentences:  "Before  that  time,  the 
little  ability  I  possessed  only  led  me  into  acts  which 
I  fear,  most  benevolent  reader,  thou  hast  already 
sufficiently  condemned ;  my  good  feelings  —  for  I 
was  not  naturally  bad  —  never  availed  me  the  least 
when  present  temptation  came  into  my  way.  I  had 
no  guide  but  passion ;  no  rule  but  the  impulse  of  the 
moment."  ^ 

Of  course  all  this  misrule  of  passion  is  frowned 
upon  in  the  proper  places,  and  duly  pronounced  to 
be  naughty.  A  pinch  of  incense  to  Mrs.  Grundy  is 
a  part  of  the  game;  but  the  game's  essence  is  the 
melodrama  and  mock-heroics  of  lawlessness.  It  is 
not  great  and  terrible  revolt,  like  that  of  Milton's 
Satan  or  Shelley's  Prometheus,  but  dandiacal  and 
Byronesque.  The  reader  feels  the  aptness  of  Long- 

*  Pelham,  chap,  xxxvii. 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  295 

fellow's  comment  upon  "  The  Caxtons  "  :  "  The 
style  produces  upon  me  the  effect  of  a  flashy  waist- 
coat festooned  with  gold  chains."  The  passion  is 
thin  and  the  worldly-wisdom  sophomoric.  Hence, 
since  self-control  is  essential  to  manhood,  these  he- 
roes of  the  twilight  prove  to  be  like  Falstaff's  men 
in  buckram — they  find  the  day  unwholesome  and  do 
not  last.  It  should  of  course  be  noted  that  Bulwer- 
Lytton  in  some  respects  outgrew  his  foppishness, 
and  that  his  later  are  also  his  better  works.  The 
posthumous  Kenelm  Chillingly  is,  like  Pelham,  con- 
scious of  the  footlights  and  the  gallery ;  but  there 
is  man-stuff  in  him. 

It  was  Mrs.  GaskelFs  lot  to  deserve,  and  in  consid- 
erable measure  to  win,  the  sympathy  and  affection  of 
her  day.  Since  that  day  a  more  genuine  homage  has 
been  paid  to  her  novels  by  the  critics  than  by  the 
public.  "  Cranf ord  "  has,  to  be  sure,  become  a  house- 
hold word,  but  "  Mary  Barton"  is  to  most  of  us  only 
a  dim  and  uncertain  name.  Yet  it  remains  a  name 
worth  entering  upon  one's  list  of  friends ;  for  though 
the  book  is  somewhat  crude  in  places,  it  has  human- 
ity, beauty,  force,  and  plot  enough  to  ensure  a  good 
old  age.  Mrs.  Gaskell  could  scarcely  have  written  it 
but  for  her  experience  as  a  clergyman's  wife  in  the 
manufacturing  districts;  nor  could  she  have  made 
the  book  appeal  as  it  did  to  the  public  of  Cobden's 
day,  had  it  not  been  for  the  genuinely  prophetic 
note  in  her  descriptions  of  the  poor  —  their  suffer- 
ings, their  patience,  their  charity,  and  their  passion. 


296  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Charles  Kingsley  should  by  rights  have  a  chapter 
to  himself,  and  give  his  brother  Henry  a  generous 
page  in  it.  The  rectory  at  Eversley  will  long  con- 
tinue to  be  a  place  of  pilgrimage  to  many  who  are 
by  no  means  blind  to  Kingsley's  notable  limita- 
tions and  outstanding  faults.  But  those  who  go 
ought  not  to  forget  that  here  Henry  wrote  the 
"  Recollections  of  Geoffrey  Hamlyn."  If  the  story 
be  still  unknown  to  them,  they  should  return 
thanks  for  a  happiness  yet  in  store;  and  when 
they  find  the  book,  look  for  its  fellow,  "Raven- 
shoe,"  as  well. 

Charles  Kingsley  doubtless  thought  of  himself, 
and  has  been  regarded  by  most  of  his  admirers, 
as  an  essentially  virile  person.  The  judgement  is  a 
just  one.  But  there  is  a  nemesis  waiting  upon  man- 
liness which  condemns  it,  as  soon  as  it  comes  to  be 
pursued  for  its  own  sake  and  sought  as  though  it 
were  an  entity,  to  a  measure  of  deterioration.  The 
virility  upon  which  men  pride  themselves  and  of 
which  they  boast  is  more  often  than  not  touched 
with  a  subtle  taint  of  effeminacy.  This  is  not  the 
effeminacy  of  softness  or  lack  of  fibre ;  but  rather 
that  of  shrillness  and  the  impulse  to  jump  to  a 
conclusion  without  calculatinor  the  distance.  The 
fault — if  fault  it  be — is  a  generous  rather  than 
a  mean  one,  since  the  impulse  of  which  it  is  an 
expression  is  the  secret  of  woman's  frequent  e£&- 
ciency  and  occasional  absurdity  as  a  reformer. 

Kingsley's   nature  was  warm   and   rich.    Emo- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  297 

tional  in  the  best  sense,  rather  than  logical,  he 
hated  sentimentality  honestly  enough  in  theory 
and  sometimes  betrayed  himself  into  it  in  practice. 
But  his  instincts  were  generally  true,  and  at  a 
certain  period  of  masculine  development  he  often 
exercises  an  influence  over  young  men  as  profound 
as  it  is  wholesome.  They  like  him  the  better  for 
his  prejudices  and  his  exuberant  vitality;  indeed, 
some  of  them  in  after  life  find  the  remnants  of  a 
grudge  against  Cardinal  Newman  abiding  in  their 
hearts  for  his  infliction  of  such  condign  punish- 
ment upon  Kingsley's  ill-advised  attack;  though 
on  the  other  hand  some  incidental  credit  ought 
to  accrue  to  the  victim  as  the  unwilling  occasion 
of  the  enrichment  of  English  literature  by  the 
"Apologia." 

A  country  parson,  devoted  to  the  service  of  his 
people  in  things  physical  as  well  as  spiritual,  and 
keenly  alive  to  the  social  problems  pressing  for 
solution  in  town  and  country  both;  an  amateur  of 
considerable  distinction  in  science,  and  a  sincere 
lover  of  outdoor  life  and  rural  sports,  Kingsley 
attempted  to  fuse  all  these  interests  in  his  books. 
The  fire  of  his  zeal  was  hot  enough  to  effect  a  sort 
of  amalgamation,  but  his  patience  was  scarcely  equal 
to  the  perfection  of  any  highly  artistic  design. 

"  Yeast "  dealt  with  conditions  among  agri- 
cultural labourers,  and  "Alton  Locke"  with  the 
corresponding  situation  in  the  towns,  after  a  fash- 
ion which  fascinated  while   it   shocked   and  en- 


298  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

raged  the  complacent  middle  class.  Both  are  too 
formless,  and  too  distinctly  tracts  for  the  time,  to 
maintain  the  place  in  literature  to  which  their 
genuine  literary  quality  might  otherwise  entitle 
them.  Like  all  Kingsley's  work  they  are  essen- 
tially and  fundamentally  religious.  He  was  never 
more  a  teacher  and  preacher  of  religion  than  when 
he  took  up  a  pen.  He  was  a  Broad  Churchman, 
too,  in  something  better  than  a  technical  sense. 
His  influence  was  due  in  good  measure  to  a  con- 
viction that  Christianity  was  capable  of  application 
to  every  need  and  phase  of  human  life.  In  his 
earlier  books  he  aimed  to  translate  it  into  terms  of 
what  would  now  be  called  sociology;  in  "Hypatia" 
he  dealt  with  the  religious  doubts  which  had  played 
so  large  a  part  in  his  own  mental  and  spiritual  de- 
velopment, and  with  certain  dangers  of  ecclesias- 
ticism.  "  Westward  Ho  !  "  set  forth  the  elements 
of  loyalty,  courage,  humility,  and  outspoken  piety 
which  seemed  to  him  needful  to  the  making  of  a  man; 
and  however  open  to  criticism  these  two  books  may 
be  in  respect  of  form  and  historical  setting,  their 
right  to  a  high  place  in  the  literature  of  their  day 
is  not  to  be  gainsaid  ;  so  human  is  their  interest,  so 
perennially  vital  are  the  problems  with  which  they 
concern  themselves,  and  so  genuine  is  their  literary 
distinction. 

Of  "  Two  Years  Ago  "  one  cannot  speak  quite 
so  positively.  More  than  twenty  have  elapsed 
since  I  read  and  reread  it  in  college.  Its  imperf  ec- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  299 

tions  in  structure  show  clearer  now  than  then ;  but 
somethino:  of  the  charm  of  wholesome  outdoor  life 
iv-hich  cholera  could  not  taint,  and  the  general  good- 
will which  even  hopeless  misapprehension  of  the  is- 
sue between  North  and  South  in  America  could  not 
embitter,  survives  them.  It  seems  a  good  book  still, 
whose  characters  live  and  whose  thews  and  sinews 
are  yet  sound,  even  though  Tom  Thurnall  be  not 
quite  so  masterful  as  of  yore.  As  in  "Hereward," 
^'  Glaucus,"  "  The  Water-Babies,"  and  the  memo- 
rable songs, — which  in  form  approach  perfection 
more  nearly  than  anything  else  their  author  ever 
did,  —  one  of  its  chief  characteristics  appears  to  be 
a  fundamentally  religious  tone.  Kingsley's  place  in 
literature  is  due  in  no  small  measure  to  his  appre- 
ciation of  the  vitality  and  significance  of  religion ; 
for  as  Professor  Masson  has  put  it,  "  There  is  not 
one  of  his  novels  which  has  not  the  power  of  Chris- 
tianity for  its  theme." 

Charles  Reade  is  not  particularly  significant  for 
this  discussion,  nor,  with  the  probable  exception  of 
"  The  Cloister  and  the  Hearth,"  does  his  work  seem 
likely  to  advance  any  very  sound  title  to  remem- 
brance ;  but  Anthony  TroUope  could  not  be  thus 
summarily  dismissed  even  if  he  had  less  claim  upon 
the  writer's  affectionate  gratitude.  I  believe  there 
are  some  people  who  do  not  care  for  Trollope,  and 
in  whom  the  mention  of  "  Framley  Parsonage  " 
wakes  no  responsive  thrill.  Indeed,  one  of  the  few 
disappointing  letters  in  Professor  Maitland's  admi- 


300  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

rable  life  of  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  is  that  in  which  con- 
fession is  made  to  Mr.  Norton  that  Trollope  grew 
dull  in  Sir  Leslie's  last  years.  Much  may,  however, 
be  forgiven  the  critic  in  this  time  of  his  weakness, 
for  he  had  loved  much  in  the  day  of  his  power.  Trol- 
lope's  work  is  probably  the  best  example  in  our  lit- 
erature of  what  I  may  call  the  incidental  debt  of 
fiction  to  religion.  Though  essentially  reverent,  he 
was  far  from  being  what  is  commonly  known  as 
^  pious.'  Had  you  called  him  so,  he  would  almost 
indubitably  have  sworn  at  you,  for  he  had  sad  gifts 
in  that  direction  which  ought  to  have  made  him  in- 
teresting to  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  even  to  the  end ;  but 
no  man  of  his  own  rank  in  English  letters  ever  drew 
so  extensively  or  so  profitably  upon  the  Church  for 
his  material.  The  group  of  stories  included  between 
^^The  Warden"  and  the  "Last  Chronicle  of  Bar- 
set  ''  represent  one  of  the  most  notable  contributions 
to  the  literature  of  manners  made  by  any  author,  in 
any  language  or  in  any  age.  The  wonder  of  it  grows 
in  view  of  Trollope's  procrustean  methods  of  com- 
position, which  condensed,  or  more  often  expanded, 
the  day's  story  to  the  limits  of  so  many  words  in  so 
many  hours ;  and  it  is  further  heightened  as  we  re- 
member that  he  had  no  extended  circle  of  clerical 
acquaintances.  The  Bishop  and  Mrs.  Proudie,  Arch- 
deacon Grantley,  the  Warden,  the  inmates  of  Fram- 
ley  Parsonage,  and  even  the  ineffable  Slope,  were 
all  creatures  of  his  imagination.  But  Trollope's 
fency  in  certain  reaches  of  its  play  was  almost  as 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  301 

Circumstantial  as  Defoe's.  He  had  inherited  a  faculty 
for  observation  from  his  mother ;  he  had  travelled 
considerably,  and  upon  what  may  be  termed  dis- 
tinctly middle-class  errands;  he  understood  men, 
and  reasoned  logically  enough  that  the  black  coat 
of  the  parson  clothed  human  nature  not  essentially 
different  from  that  sheltered  by  his  own  favourite 
pink.  He  was  neither  cynical  nor  sentimental ;  he 
neither  soared  nor  sank  ;  demigods  and  reprobates 
were  equally  out  of  his  range.   He  moved  upon  — 

The  level  of  every  day's 
Most  quiet  need,  by  sun  and  candle  light. 

But  he  moved  there  with  a  very  sure  and  confident 
step,  at  the  bidding  of  a  true  creative  instinct ;  and 
he  treated  his  characters  with  an  admirable  even- 
handedness  which  is  one  of  the  most  desirable  as  it 
is  one  of  the  rarest  embodiments  of  charity.  It  is 
easy  to  sneer  at  his  ideal  of  morality  as  Philistine ; 
but  it  is  idle  and  silly  to  do  so  simply  because  in 
the  large  sense  that  ideal  is  sound,  wholesome,  and 
fitted  to  human  need.  His  Grantleys  and  Proudies 
not  only  amuse  but  instruct  us  with  their  picture  of 
the  overgrowth  of  worldliness,  sometimes  merely 
petty  and  sometimes  mordant  and  corrupting,  upon 
natures  that  mean  to  be  as  honourable  as  they  cer- 
tainly are  narrow.  His  "  Three  Clerks,"  though  by 
no  means  great  figures,  yet  offer  a  highly  significant 
object-lesson  of  the  worth  to  life  of  loyalty,  veracity, 
and  trustworthiness — especially  in  the  matter  of 


302  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

other  people's  money.  "  Framley  Parsonage  "  is  far 
from  being  a  startling  tale ;  no  moving  incidents  by 
flood  or  field  enliven  it;  but  it  is  not  therefore  a  dull 
book ;  nor  will  it  be  while  the  ^  domestic  virtues/ 
toward  which  contemporary  fiction  chooses  to  be  so 
patronizing,  have  significance  for  us.  Let  us  grant 
that  it  is  plain  prose.  In  the  same  breath  we  must 
admit  that  it  is  good  prose,  worth  writing,  and  bound 
to  be  worth  reading  so  long  as  it  shall  concern  one 
generation  to  know  how  its  predecessors  lived. 

Trollope,  then,  not  only  relates  himself  to  insti- 
tutional religion  by  drawing  his  most  notable  char- 
acters from  its  service ;  he  shows  a  more  intimate 
kinship  to  its  spirit  in  the  ethical  tone  which  per- 
vades his  work.  The  moral  is  rarely  obtruded;  it 
is  never  absent. 

No  writer  of  English  fiction  —  certainly  no  writer 
of  the  first  rank — is  more  distinctly  and  confess- 
edly the  historian  of  conscience  than  George  Eliot. 
Wordsworth's  "  Ode  to  Duty  "  might  well  serve  as 
headpiece  to  her  collected  works.  The  theory  might 
conceivably  be  defended  that  her  emphasis  upon 
ethical  problems  was  due,  at  least  in  part,  to  her  de- 
partures from  evangelical  orthodoxy  and  the  formal 
irregularity  of  her  relation  to  G.  H.  Lewes.  She  had 
been  of  a  strait  sect.  She  was  convinced  of  the  funda- 
mental connection  between  ethics  and  religion.  Fol- 
lowing, even  in  her  most  heterodox  days,  the  gen- 
eral bent  of  her  youth,  she  was  concerned  to  show 
that  a  change  of  views  such  as  she  had  experienced 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  303 

in  no  way  invalidated  the  essential  appeal  of  religion 
or  the  soundness  of  moral  life.  She  illustrates  again 
a  truth  as  old  as  Socrates  and  St.  Paul,  that  those 
who  are  accused  of  corrupting  youth  have  sometimes 
the  deepest  concern  with  morality,  and  those  who 
break  with  the  formal  faith  of  the  fathers  have  often 
the  liveliest  sense  of  religion.  It  is  by  no  means  a 
universal  truth  and  may  easily  be  put  to  base  uses ; 
but,  such  as  it  is,  George  Eliot  exemplified  it. 

With  her  the  era  of  the  '  serious  person '  in  fic- 
tion may  be  said  fairly  to  have  begun.  Scott,  Dick- 
ens, and  Thackeray  had  been  serious  writers  in  all 
good  conscience ;  yet  they  had  treated  their  art  with 
a  sort  of  masterful  gaiety ;  a  profession  of  letters 
they  might  have  recognized — scarcely  a  profession 
of  fiction-writing.  With  George  Eliot  men  and  wo- 
men began  to  realize  that  the  writing  of  novels  was 
a  very  grave  business.  Literatures  must  be  ran- 
sacked for  the  sake  of  "  Romola  "  ;  Spain  visited  that 
"  The  Spanish  Gypsy  "  might  have  her  due ;  Sugden 
pored  over  and  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison  consulted 
that  the  law  of  "  Felix  Holt"  might  prove  impecca- 
ble. It  was  all  very  well ;  I  suppose  that  it  was  all 
inevitable ;  but  it  was  none  the  less  a  pity :  because 
the  fact  is  that  when  the  canons  of  an  art  are  all 
discovered  and  its  very  bye-laws  codified,  the  art  it- 
self materializes  into  a  craft.  The  work  of  the  crafts- 
man may  easily  be  superior  in  detail  to  that  of  the 
artist ;  but  there  remains  this  distinction,  that  art  is 
the  expression  of  a  person,  and  so  far  forth  its  pro- 


304  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

duct  is  related  immediately  to  life's  ultimate  and  in- 
definable sources ;  the  product  of  the  craft,  however 
highly  wrought  and  useful,  is  always  a  mediate  and 
derived  thing,  relating  itself  primarily  to  a  rule 
rather  than  to  a  soul.  How  true  this  is  will  be 
abundantly  illustrated  in  a  later  chapter,  where  we 
shall  find  busy  little  men  sweating  over  the  details 
of  '  local  colour '  on  the  one  hand,  or,  on  the  other, 
rushing  into  artificial  extravagances  in  the  vain  hope 
of  establishing  their  originality.  They  only  adver- 
tise their  bondage,  the  one  by  his  acquiescence,  the 
other  by  his  revolt. 

I  am  not  prepared  to  say  that  the  cloud  which  ob- 
scured the  religious  faith  of  Marian  Evans  is  ac- 
countable for  the  somewhat  stilted  nature  of  George 
Eliot's  later  books.  It  is  a  quality  not  easy  to  define; 
but  for  lack  of  a  better  term  I  must  call  it  feeble- 
ness of  life.  Her  men  and  women  are  cast  in  a  suf- 
ficiently generous  mould ;  she  does  not  stint  them 
in  body  or  in  mind;  but  circumstances  seem  to 
thrust  them  too  easily  into  the  background,  where 
they  are  in  danger  of  being  mistaken  for  automata. 
Their  life  is  thin,  and  none  the  less  thin  when  pas- 
sionate. This  does  not  appear  in  the  "  Scenes  from 
Clerical  Life,"  "  Adam  Bede,"  or  "  Silas  Marner," 
as  in  "  Romola."  Nor  for  me  is  it  so  oppressive  even 
in  "Middlemarch"  as  in  the  "Mill  on  the  Floss." 

But  I  do  venture  the  conjecture  that  the  religious 
experience  through  which  she  passed  affected  her 
sense  of  humour.  This  was  less  by  way  of  extinc- 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  305 

tion,  which  in  her  case  was  fortunately  impossible, 
than  by  way  of  limitation.  George  Eliot  was  a  great 
humourist ;  but  the  reader  may  safely  challenge  any 
student  of  her  works  to  cite  a  half-dozen  humourous 
incidents  in  them.  She  was  mistress  of  the  humour- 
ous phrase  and  the  clever  apothegm,  as  Mrs.  Poy- 
ser,  Mrs.  Cadwallader,  and  Miss  Priscilla  Lammeter* 
shall  long  hve  to  testify.  In  the  handling  of  her 
choruses,  like  the  rustic  gathering  in  the  bar  of  the 
Eainbow,  or  the  onlookers  at  Squire  Cass's  New 
Year  ball  in  "  Silas  Marner,"  the  humourous  inci- 
dent appears  for  a  moment,  but  only  realizes  itself 
as  a  setting  for  comment  upon  life. 

However  this  may  be,  there  is  no  accounting  for 
George  Eliot  except  upon  the  ground  of  her  reli- 
gious experience,  Evangelical,  Unitarian,  and  Com- 
tist.  The  most  casual  acquaintance  with  her  work  is 
sufficient  to  show  her  large  dependence  for  material 
upon  the  characters  and  problems  of  religion.  The 
titles  of  "Scenes  from  Clerical  Life"  and  "Janet's 
Kepentance,"  which  brought  her  into  fame,  are  sig- 
nificant. Dinah,  the  Methodist  preacher,  is  the  he- 
roine, if  not  indeed  the  central  figure,  of  "  Adam 
Bede."   Savonarola  is  to  be  held  accountable  for 

^  Priscilla's  humour  does  not  of  course  compare  in  volume  with 
Mrs.  Poyser's  ;  but  its  quality  is  every  whit  as  good.  She  is  bound 
to  stay  upon  the  farm  with  her  father,  for  if  anything  turns  out 
wrong,  as  it  can  't  *'  but  do  in  these  times,  there  's  nothing  kills  a 
man  so  soon  as  having  nobody  to  find  fault  with  but  himself."  She 
must  also  keep  up  her  herd  of  cows,  inasmuch  as  "  there  's  nothing 
like  a  dairy  if  folks  want  a  bit  o'  worrit  to  make  the  days  pass." 


306:  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"  Eomola,"  since  it  was  the  Florence  of  his  day  that 
she  set  herself  with  painful  conscientiousness  to 
depict.  No  one  does  more  to  redeem  "  Felix  Holt " 
from  failure  than  the  Rev.  Rufus  Lyon,  nor  to  en- 
liven the  somewhat  sombre  landscape  of  "  Middle- 
march  "  than  the  sprightly  Mrs.  Cadwallader.  Nor 
is  this  constant  reference  to  the  official  representa- 
tives of  religion  a  mere  superficial  accident.  The 
problems  of  her  novels  are  preeminently  problems 
of  the  soul.  Janet  '  finds  herself '  through  the  influ- 
ence of  the  Evangelical  Tryan.  The  story  of  "  Silas 
Marner"  is  a  narrative  of  restoration  to  faith  and 
therefore  to  life.  The  old  weaver's  heart,  which  had 
been  withering  into  insensibility  under  the  influ- 
ences of  injustice,  misunderstanding,  neglect,  and 
selfishness,  becomes  again  as  the  heart  of  a  little 
child  under  the  burden  and  the  joy  of  Eppie's  adop- 
tion. The  sermon  of  Dinah  on  the  village  common 
might  have  been  a  veritable  utterance  of  George 
Eliot's  Methodist  aunt  had  there  been  any  need  to 
look  abroad  for  it.  In  point  of  fact  it  was  her  own 
in  a  deeper  sense  than  almost  anything  she  ever 
wrote ;  produced,  as  she  has  told  us,  with  tears,  and 
representative  in  the  highest  degree  of  her  deep 
religious  nature  and  her  keen  homiletic  instinct. 

Parallel  to  these  questions  of  religious  faith,  which 
find  such  large  place  in  the  studies  of  Janet,  Dinah, 
and  Silas  Marner,  move  the  great  ethical  problems 
from  which  they  can  never  long  be  separated.  These 
latter  may  almost  be  said  to  represent  the  bulk  o£ 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  307 

George  Eliot's  work.  They  appear  in  the  relations 
of  Donnithorne  and  Hetty ;  in  the  duplicity  of  God- 
frey Cass  —  if  duplicity  be  not  too  harsh  a  term  for 
the  concealment  of  one  unworthy  and  unfortunate 
rather  than  criminal  episode  in  a  generally  upright 
life  ;  in  the  progress  of  Romola  toward  self-know- 
ledge, and  in  that  of  Tito  toward  self -conviction  ;  as 
well  as  in  the  remarkable  embodiment  of  hypocrisy, 
half-premeditated,  half-unconscious,  in  Bulstrode. 
Whatever  may  be  said  of  George  Eliot's  failure  to 
retain  faith  in  any  formulated  doctrine  of  grace, 
there  can  be  no  question  of  her  grasp  upon  a  doc- 
trine of  judgement.  No  greater  exemplar  of  the  so- 
called  Nonconformist  conscience  ever  Hved  and  wrote. 
It  is  quite  true  that  she  insisted  upon  her  privilege 
and  obligation  to  distinguish  between  the  conven- 
tional and  the  fundamentally  ethical.  She  was  by 
no  means  insensitive  to  criticism  of  her  relation  with 
Lewes,  as  the  letter  to  Mrs.  Bray  in  which  such  em- 
phasis is  laid  upon  her  own  view  of  it  as  a  real  and 
sacred  marriage  remains  to  testify.  Yet  she  was  no 
mere  contemner  of  convention,  as  was  shown  by  her 
regular  marriage  to  Mr.  Cross  and  the  consequent 
wrath  of  those  whom  Mr.  Jeaffreson  calls  the  "  ex- 
treme Shelleyan  Socialists."  However  these  episodes 
in  her  experience  may  be  interpreted,  the  fact  re- 
mains that  no  writer  of  the  first  rank  has  more  in- 
sistently or  ably  rung  the  changes  upon  the  great 
ethical  principle  of  Christianity,  "Whatsoever  a 
man  soweth,that  shall  he  also  reap." 


308  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

One  other  characteristic  of  George  Eliot's  work 
in  fiction  which  relates  it  closely  to  religion  is  her 
appreciation  of  the  worth  of  common  life  and  her 
keen  sense  of  its  pathos  and  mystery.  Her  best 
work  is  provincial.  She  is  most  at  home  when  de- 
scribing commonplace,  middle-class  people  with  the 
humbler  folk  who  surround  them  ;  and  her  know- 
ledge of  their  life  was  thorough  enough  to  render  this 
description  immune  from  the  contagion  of  cheap 
contempt  and  shallow  cynicism.  In  literature  as  in 
religion  contempt  is  usually  a  product  of  disease. 
The  work  which  embodies  it,  however  clever  it  may 
seem  for  the  moment,  is  marked  for  early  death.  I 
am  aware  that  Swift  may  be  quoted  against  me 
here ;  so  may  Lucretius ;  but  in  the  sceva  indig- 
natio  of  such  genius  there  are  positive  elements 
capable  of  survival,  despite  the  worst  that  the  malig- 
nant influences  of  contempt  can  do.  The  people 
of  George  Eliot's  villages  and  provincial  towns  may 
lead  limited  lives,  but  they  move  nevertheless  in 
a  large  world. 

" '  Ah  [says  Dolly  gravely  to  Silas,  wondering 
whence  Eppie  could  have  come  to  him],  ah,  it's  like 
the  night  and  the  morning,  and  the  sleeping  and  the 
waking,  and  the  rain  and  the  harvest  —  one  goes 
and  the  other  comes,  and  we  know  nothing  how  or 
where.  We  may  strive  and  scrat  and  fend,  but  it's 
little  we  can  do  arter  all  —  the  big  things  come  and 
go  wi'  no  striving  o'  our'n — they  do,  that  they  do.* "  * 

'  Silas  Marnery  chap.  xiv. 


THE  MASTERS  OF  FICTION  309 

It  was  in  the  same  spirit  that,  in  a  letter  to  Black- 
wood, George  Eliot  exhorted  him  to  open  his  eyes 
to  the  poetry  and  pathos,  the  tragedy  and  comedy 
of  common  life,  and  it  was  characteristic  of  her  that 
"  Middlemarch  "  should  end  with  such  a  confession 
of  faith  as  the  following  :  "  That  things  are  not  so 
ill  with  you  and  me  as  they  might  have  been  is  half 
owing  to  the  number  who  lived  faithfully  a  hidden 
life  and  rest  in  un visited  tombs."* 

Later  writers  are  not  lacking  in  this  same  sense 
of  mystery  and  pathos;  they  have  too  often  striven 
for  distinction,  however,  by  treating  it,  as  Sir  Leslie 
Stephen  has  somewhere  said,  either  as  a  grievance 
which  can  be  summarily  removed,  or  as  an  oppor- 
tunity for  exhibiting  their  own  sensibility.  George 
Eliot  did  neither.  She  recognized  grievances  to 
be  removed,  and  in  "Felix  Holt"  came  perilously 
near  writing  a  three-volume  tract  upon  them.  She 
possessed  sensibility  and  may  occasionally  have  in- 
dulged it.  But  she  did  not  rail  at  fate  or  treat  life 
as  an  evil.  On  the  contrary,  she  everywhere  recog- 
nizes the  need  of  some  generous  coordinating  prin- 
ciple, if  it  is  to  be  quite*  sane  or  wholesome.  The 
instinct  which  kept  her  from  proselyting  in  the 
name  of  ^rationalism'  was  therefore  a  true  one, 
inasmuch  as  it  warned  her  that  to  pull  out  a  main 
prop  of  life  without  putting  some  equivalent  stay 

^  These  two  passages  are  set  in  a  similar  relation  by  Mr.  Herbert 
Paul  in  his  Stray  Leaves,  p.  43.  His  essay  upon  George  Eliot  in  that 
volume  is  especially  notable  for  its  appreciation  of  Middlemarch. 


310  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  its  place  was  an  essentially  irrational  proceeding. 
Whether  Evangelical  or  Positivist,  she  remained 
in  some  real  sense  religious  and  was  always  the 
apostle  of  some  gospel  or  other.  The  distinctively 
Christian  note  is  often  in  abeyance,  as  she  held  it 
honestly  in  abeyance  in  her  experience ;  but  none 
the  less  it  remains  the  subject  of  a  sort  of  wistful 
concern  to  her  and  to  her  characters,  as  though  it 
were  meant  for  life  and  only  the  disjointed  times 
kept  life  from  claiming  it. 

Dolly  Winthrop  and  Silas  sum  the  matter  up  in 
their  last  conversation. 

^^ '  I  shall  never  know  [says  the  latter,  referring 
to  the  false  accusation  brought  against  him  many 
years  before]  whether  they  got  at  the  truth  o'  the 
robbery.  .  .  It 's  dark  to  me,  Mrs.  Winthrop,  that 
is ;  I  doubt  it  '11  be  dark  to  the  last.' 

"  ^  Well,  yes,  Master  Marner,'  said  Dolly,  who  sat 
with  a  placid  listening  face,  now  bordered  by  grey 
hairs;  ^ I  doubt  it  may.  It's  the  will  o'  Them  above 
as  a  many  things  should  be  dark  to  us ;  but  there 's 
some  things  as  I  've  never  felt  i'  the  dark  about, 
and  they  're  mostly  what  comes  i'  the  day's  work. 
You  were  hard  done  by  that  once.  Master  Marner, 
and  it  seems  as  you  '11  never  know  the  rights  of 
it;  but  that  doesn't  hinder  there  being  a  rights, 
Master  Marner,  for  all  it's  dark  to  you  and  me.' 

"^No,'  said  Silas,  ^no;  that  doesn't  hinder. 
Since  the  time  the  child  was  sent  to  me  and  I  've 
come  to  love  her  as  myself,  I  've  had  Hght  enough 
to  trusten  by ;  and  now  she  says  she  '11  never  leave 
me.  I  think  I  shall  trusten  till  I  die.' " 


CHAPTER  X 

THE    NEW    RADICALISM 

"Some  day,"  wrote  Sir  Leslie  Stephen  to  Mr. 
C.  E.  Norton,  in  1889,  "  I  shall  remark  upon  the 
extraordinary  phenomenon  that  Mill  and  Newman 
and  Carlyle  all  lived  in  the  same  century."*  It  is  a 
tribute  to  the  intellectual  wealth  of  the  early  Vic- 
torian decades,  which  might  have  been  enhanced 
by  the  inclusion  of  Ruskin  in  the  group;  since  in 
spite  of  his  relation  to  Carlyle  he  represents  a 
fourth  line  of  influence.  The  connection  of  New- 
man and  Ruskin  with  the  Evangelicals  has  already 
been  noted,  together  with  Carlyle*s  temporary  pur- 
pose to  prepare  himself  for  the  Presbyterian  minis- 
try. James  Mill  not  only  entertained  such  a  pur- 
pose but  accomplished  it.  Though  a  shoemaker's 
son,  he  became  an  excellent  scholar,  entered  the 
pulpit,  and  maintained  himself  as  a  minister  for 
several  years.  He  seems,  however,  never  to  have 
had  much  heart  for  his  profession,  and  by  the  time 
of  his  settlement  in  London  in  1802  had  already 
developed  violent  anti-religious  prejudices  which 
were  destined  to  play  a  large  part  in  the  education 
*  Life  and  Letters  of  Sir  Leslie  StepTien,  p.  397. 


312  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  his  famous  son.  How  much  of  James  Mill's 
hostility  to  religion  was  due  to  the  influence  of 
Bentham  may  not  now  be  determined.  Bentham 
himself  presents  a  figure  full  of  seK-contradiction, 
with  his  genuinely  humane  instincts,  his  just  dis- 
content with  the  shape  of  British  jurisprudence, — 

If  shape  it  might  be  called,  that  shape  had  none, 

and  his  untiring  efforts  to  give  it  form  and  real  ap- 
plication to  the  people's  needs ;  efforts  which,  as 
Mill  said,  "  found  the  philosophy  of  law  a  chaos, 
and  left  it  a  science  "  ;  and  at  the  same  time  his  vio- 
lent prejudices,  his  capacity  for  a  sort  of  learned 
Billingsgate,  his  intolerance  of  all  difference  from 
his  opinions,  and  his  dogmatic  denial  of  many  things 
apparently  upon  the  sole  ground  that  they  had  not 
chanced  to  fall  within  the  limits  of  his  own  expe- 
rience. His  Biblical  criticism,  though  incompetent 
enough  in  other  respects,  has  at  least  the  merit  of 
being  humourous,  since  he  numbers  St.  Luke  among 
the  twelve  Apostles,  and  refers  to  Priscillaand  Aquila 
as  two  female  disciples  of  St.  Paul.  ^ 

Beside  him  among  the  radical  influences  of  the 
early  century  must  be  set  Priestley  and  William  God- 
win. The  former  was  a  Presbyterian-Unitarian  min- 
ister who  suffered  many  things  at  the  hands  of  the 
Birmingham  mob,  for  the  sake  of  what  he  believed 
to  be  his  faith  and  what  his  enemies  thought  to  be 

'  Benn,  History  of  English  Rationalism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century, 
vol.  i,  p.  302. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  313 

his  lack  of  it.  A  consistent  and  valiant  champion 
of  the  French  Revolution,  he  was  even  elected  a 
deputy  to  the  National  Convention  ;  though  he  has 
become  better  known  to  later  generations  for  his 
distinofuished  achievements  as  a  chemist.  A  friend 
of  Franklin,  moreover,  to  whom  he  was  indebted 
for  aid  in  the  preparation  of  his  "  History  of  Elec- 
tricity," he  carried  all  of  Franklin's  enhghtened 
curiosity  and  impatience  of  mere  tradition  into  chemi- 
cal speculation  and  experiment.  He  has  a  good  claim 
to  first  place  in  the  new  science  which  displaced  the 
old  phlogiston  theories,  and  he  disputes  with  La- 
voisier the  discovery  of  oxygen,  while  the  Utilitari- 
ans are  no  less  under  obligation  to  him  for  their 
watchword,  "  The  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number."  He  died  in  America  in  1804,  roundly  de- 
nounced as  an  infidel  by  many  of  the  orthodox,  but 
"believing  himself  to  hold  the  doctrines  of  the 
Primitive  Christians,  and  looking  for  the  second 
coming  of  Christ." 

Godwin  was  a  man  of  different  type :  one  of  those 
anarchists  in  theory  who  live  an  ill-ordered  and  half- 
parasitical,  yet  upon  the  whole  a  laborious  and  hum- 
drum life ;  a  radical  of  radicals,  who  would  submit 
to  the  form  of  marriage  with  his  first  wife  only  for 
the  sake  of  legitimizing  their  child,  but  who  was 
mightily  perturbed  when  the  child  herself  a.  few 
years  later  ran  away  with  Shelley,  to  make  practical 
application  of  her  father's  theories.  It  is  a  question 
whether  he  ever  quite  forgave  this  evidence  of  dis- 


314  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

cipleship,  though  some  solace  was  to  be  found  in  the 
very  considerable  sums  which  he  extracted  from 
Shelley's  complaisant  purse.  The  pointing  of  amoral 
is  no  part  of  my  purpose  in  this  brief  reference  to 
Godwin's  career ;  but  a  tale  might  be  highly  adorned 
by  the  lives  and  adventures  of  the  group  who  made 
up  his  family  after  the  second  marriage.  There  were 
Fanny  Imlay,  the  illegitimate  child  of  his  first  wife, 
destined  to  die  by  her  own  hand  some  fifteen  years 
later,  and  a  month  to  the  day  after  the  suicide  of 
Shelley's  first  wife;  the  daughter  Mary,  who,  having 
been  legitimized  by  the  tardy  marriage  of  her  parents 
as  above  related,  was  herself  by  a  yet  tardier  cere- 
mony to  become  the  second  Mrs.  Shelley;  a  daughter 
of  Godwin's  second  wife  by  a  former  marriage,  who 
in  her  turn,  as  Lord  Byron's  mistress  and  the  mother 
of  "  AUegra,"  was  to  illustrate  the  family  emanci- 
pation from  conventionality ;  and  William  Godwin, 
Junior,  the  son  of  this  second  marriage  and  a  youth 
of  promise  which  was  blighted  by  his  death  at  the 
age  of  twenty-nine.' 

Godwin  has  been  characterized  as  "  largely  a  blend 
of  Micawber  and  Pecksniff,"  and  there  is  some 
ground  for  the  charge.  Yet  he  had  a  kind  of  gen- 
ius, as  he  showed  a  species  of  industry,  and  has  en- 
tered into  a  sort  of  fame.  Whether  or  not  honesty 

*  The  extraordinary  composition  of  this  group  is  noted  by  the 
writer  of  an  excellent  sketch  of  Godwin  in  Chambers'  Encyclopedia 
of  English  Literature,  vol.  ii,  p.  703.  Cf.  also,  the  rather  dreary  Life 
by  Kegan  Paul. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  315 

and  benevolence  of  purpose  admit  of  similar  quali- 
fication I  do  not  undertake  to  say ;  but  there  is  no 
doubt  that  he  did  something  to  further  the  objects 
of  the  Utilitarians,  as  he  may  also  have  helped  at 
once  to  propagate  and  mitigate  the  principles  of  the 
Revolution.  A  practical  anarchist,  in  so  far  as  he 
would  have  had  the  doctrine  of  laissez  faire  carried 
to  its  extreme  conclusions,  he  yet  was  no  advocate  of 
violence.  Agreeing  on  the  other  hand  with  Bentham 
in  his  utilitarian  aim,  he  differed  widely  from  him 
in  respect  of  means ;  and  it  was  not  until  Herbert 
Spencer's  day  that  the  two  lines  of  influence  repre- 
sented by  Bentham  and  Godwin  were  caught  up  and 
woven  together.^  Godwin  too  began  life  as  a  minis- 
ter of  religion,  and  preached  with  some  degree  of 
regularity  for  a  half-dozen  years.  Later  on  he  be- 
came, or  thought  that  he  became,  an  atheist;  but 
under  the  influence  of  Coleridge  he  seems  to  have 
passed  out  of  this  region  of  denial  into  a  somewhat 
misty  theism.  Yet  even  in  the  days  of  "Political 
Justice  "  he  was  able  to  rouse  in  young  men  an  im- 
pidse  that  was  close  akin  to  the  spirit  of  Christianity. 
"  I  had  never  before,"  said  Crabb  Robinson  after 
reading  it,  "  nor,  I  am  afraid,  have  I  ever  since,  felt 
so  strongly  the  duty  of  not  living  to  one's  self,  but 
of  having  for  one's  sole  object  the  good  of  the  com- 
munity." ^ 

*  Benn,  History  of  English  Rationalism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century ^ 
Tol.  ii,  pp.  206-207. 
'  Reminiscences f  vol.  i,  chap,  iii  (1795).  Eobinson  was  equal,  how- 


316  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Among  the  many  assaults  which  so-called  ^  ration- 
alism' makes  upon  the  validity  of  religion,  one  is 
based  upon  its  Protean  character.  Religion,  these 
critics  allege,  faced  with  new  obstacles,  is  always 
changing  its  form,  realigning  its  battalions,  zigzag- 
ging toward  its  goal  when  the  straight  path  seems 
blocked.  Such  a  writer  as  Mr.  Benn,  in  his  recent 
"  History  of  English  Rationalism,"  is  almost  as  con- 
temptuous of  the  willingness  shown  by  progressive 
Christian  teachers  to  welcome  new  scientific  discov- 
eries as  he  is  toward  the  ultra-conservatives.  The 
latter  are  obscurantists,  theology's  normal  product; 
the  former  are  pretenders  whose  charlatan  facility 
in  the  Chinese  art  of  '  saving  one's  face  '  is  equally 
characteristic  of  the  baneful  tendency  inseparable 
from  religious  thought  and  practice.  The  argument 
appears  to  be  that  revelation  is,  from  its  very  nature, 
a  fixed,  complete,  and  stable  sum  of  truth ;  that  the- 
ology is  really  as  incapable  of  growth  as  Macaulay 
represented  it  to  be  when  he  seated  his  New  Zea- 
lander  —  long  since  become  a  prince  of  bores  — 
upon  a  pier  of  London  Bridge  to  sketch  the  ruins 
of  St.  Paul's ;  that  a  period  of  general  scientific  ad- 
vance by  which  other  regions  of  human  experience 
profit  must  of  necessity  prove  fatal  to  faith ,  and 

ever,  to  distinguishing  between  Godwin  the  philosopher  and  Godwin 
the  man  of  business.  Some  years  later  he  was  with  Coleridge  when 
Godwin  and  a  certain  Mr.  Rough  met  for  the  first  time.  The  next 
morning  both  called  upon  Robinson  within  an  hour,  each  with  the 
inquiry  as  to  whether  the  other  would  be  likely  to  lend  him  £50. 
Ibid.f  chap,  xv,  Feb.  26, 1812,  note. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  317 

that  only  another  proof  of  ingrained  clerical  pre- 
sumption and  insincerity  is  given  by  those  teachers 
of  reliofion  who  maintain  that  older  theologfies  were 
false  only  in  so  far  as  they  were  partial  or  dogmatic, 
that  they  took  account  of  real  experiences  and  an- 
swered to  essential  needs,  and  that  the  cry  for  a 
living  God  still  sounds  in  the  world,  —  that  it  is 
significant,  that  the  attempt  to  answer  it  is  worth 
while  and  can  be  made  most  effectively  in  terms  of 
modern  speech.  The  difficulty  of  the  'rationalist's' 
argument  lies  in  its  major  premiss.  His  claim  that 
revelation  is  incapable  of  development  is  not  only 
open  to  contradiction,  —  it  has  been  explicitly  de- 
nied by  the  greatest  Christian  teachers.  This  denial 
was  indeed  a  chief  article  in  the  faith  of  Christian- 
ity's Founder.  According  to  the  Christian  tradition, 
He  began  his  ministry  with  the  assurance  that  the 
national  religious  expectation  was  in  process  of  ful- 
filment, and  therefore  of  advance  and  uplift  to  a 
higher  stage.  He  ended  it  with  the  solemn  promise 
that  though  it  had  become  expedient  for  Him  to  go 
away,  the  Spirit  whose  exponent  He  had  been  would 
make  his  continued  abode  with  believers,  introdu- 
cing them  by  degrees  into  all  truth.  Change,  develop- 
ment, and  capacity  to  make  gain  of  new  knowledge 
are  of  the  essence  of  religion.  In  so  far  as  Chris- 
tianity exhibits  these,  it  but  attests  its  possession  of 
the  '  notes '  of  a  genuine  and  lively  faith.  Religion 
may  easily  enough  be  marred  and  wounded,  starved 
into  grotesque  forms  of  superstition  or  temporarily 


318  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

excited  into  fanaticism,  persecuted  to  apparent  death 
in  some  isolated  cases  and  buried  in  a  tomb  made 
doubly  sure  against  resurrection.  But  it  refuses  to 
stay  there.  Grant  it  a  generation  in  the  grave  and 
it  only  comes  forth  refreshed.  The  impatience  of  its 
enemies  is  justified,  and  the  not  infrequent  note  of 
petulance  in  Mr.  Benn's  interesting  volumes  ought 
therefore  to  be  borne  with  a  large  charity.  For  the 
^  rationalist's '  labor  is  Sisyphean ;  the  one  thing  cer- 
tain about  it  is  that,  however  successful  it  may  seem 
to-day,  it  will  all  have  to  be  done  over  again  to- 
morrow; upon  no  other  field  of  conflict  than  that 
where  men  think  to  kill  religion  is  it  necessary  so 
many  times  to  slay  the  slain. 

John  Stuart  Mill  fell  heir  to  a  pretty  consistent 
atheism.  Bentham  is  commonly  reckoned  as  an 
atheist,  but  there  were  fine  inconsistencies  in  him 
which  do  much  to  humanize  his  life  and  something 
to  mitigate  his  creed.  With  James  Mill,  however, 
the  negation  of  belief  seems  to  have  hardened  into 
a  sort  of  dogmatism.^  Few  men  of  honourable  life 
and  very  great  intellectual  gifts  have  ever  left  a 
more  unlovely  picture  of  themselves  to  posterity, 
and  this  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  we  see  him 
through  the  eyes  of  filial  devotion.  John  Mill's 
admiration  for  his  father  seems  to  have  been  sec- 


*  I  would  not  imply  that  he  was  dogmatic  in  his  assertion  of 
atheism,  but  only  in  his  claim  that  nothing  valid  and  significant 
can  be  known  or  believed  in  the  realm  of  religion.  Cf .  J.  S.  Mill's 
Autobiography,  chap.  ii. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  319 

ond  only  to  that  which  he  had  for  his  wife,  and 
leads  the  reader  of  the  "Autobiography"  to  ques- 
tion a  little  whether  the  same  tendency  to  almost 
passionate  exaggeration  may  not  have  coloured  it. 
Yet  posterity  has  much  to  thank  James  Mill  for. 
It  would  be  ungenerous  to  minimize  the  service  to 
clear  thought  as  well  as  to  practical  reform  ren- 
dered by  this  most  consistent  and  unpleasant  of  the 
Utilitarians;  but  it  sinks  into  second  place  when 
compared  with  the  daring  experiment  which  he 
made  in  the  education  of  his  son.  The  opening 
pages  of  the  "Autobiography"  tell  the  story  of  a 
prodigy  at  once  so  fascinating  and  so  abnormal  as 
well-nigh  to  threaten  even  an  experience-philoso- 
pher's disbelief  in  miracle.  Few  children  can  have 
been  born  into  the  world  with  purely  intellectual 
endowments  of  a  higher  class  than  those  of  John 
Mill;  none,  it  is  safe  to  say,  ever  found  greater 
demands  made  upon  his  powers  during  infancy. 
This  picture  of  a  boy  beginning  Greek  at  the  age 
of  three,  and  reading,  before  Latin  was  begun  in  hi8 
eighth  year,  ^sop,  Xenophon's  "Anabasis,"  "Cy- 
ropsedia,"  and  "Memorials  of  Socrates,"  the  whole 
of  Herodotus,  with  parts  of  Diogenes  Laertius, 
Lucian,  and  Isocrates ;  then  passing  on,  at  eight, 
to  grapple  with  six  dialogues  of  Plato,  is  as  pain- 
ful as  it  fortunately  is  unparalleled.  "My  father, 
in  all  his  teaching,"  says  the  son,  quite  as  much  in 
gratitude  as  in  criticism,  "  demanded  of  me  not 
only  the  utmost  that  I  could  do,  but  much  that  I 


320  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

could  by  no  possibility  have  done."  I  have  no 
space  and  as  little  need  to  remind  the  reader  of 
the  beginning  of  Latin  and  mathematics ;  the  un- 
remitted teaching  of  the  younger  children;  the 
long  list  of  grotesquely  mature  volumes  read  and 
reported  upon  to  his  father  during  their  daily 
walks.  It  is  an  oft-repeated  story ;  but  the  wonder 
grows.  Amid  it  all  two  things  are  eminent  by  their 
absence,  —  the  natural  play  of  childhood  and  the 
equally  normal  and  necessary  speculations  about, 
and  constructive  training  in,  the  rudiments  of  reli- 
gion. "  I  am  thus,"  he  tells  us  in  a  familiar  passage 
of  the  ^'Autobiography,"  "one  of  the  very  few  ex- 
amples in  this  country  of  one  who  has  not  thrown 
off  religious  belief,  but  never  had  it." 

This  is  the  feature  of  John  Stuart  Mill's  train- 
ing that  gives  to  the  exercise  of  his  great  powers 
a  peculiar  interest  for  us,  as  it  gave  a  peculiar  sig- 
nificance to  his  teaching  in  the  middle  of  last  cen- 
tury. Here  was  a  man  of  first-rate,  if  not  unique 
and  transcendent  gifts,  heir  to  a  distinguished 
philosophic  and  economic  heritage,  who  had  not 
only  accumulated  great  stores  of  learning,  but  had 
also  mastered  himself  in  such  degree  as  to  bring 
an  almost  unexampled  measure  of  fairness  and 
generosity  to  the  consideration  of  questions  whose 
discussion  often  develops  more  heat  than  light. 
Abundantly  capable  of  taking  a  side  and  main- 
taining a  position  against  all  comers ;  no  stranger 
either  to  the   joy  of   battle  or  to  the  worth  of 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  321 

battle-cry  and  epithet,  especially  when  the  strife 
is  political  and  economic;  a  convinced  confessor 
of  the  experience-philosophy,  moreover,  he  was 
singularly  fitted  to  become  the  high  priest  of  that 
Utilitarianism  which,  in  their  several  generations, 
Bentham,  James  Mill,  and  Grote  exalted  into  a  sub- 
stitute for  rehgion ;  and  he  had  no  other  religion 
of  which  to  rid  himself.  Like  Gladstone  among 
the  Tories,  he  was  the  rising  hope  of  the  stern  and 
unbending  Radicals ;  and  he  was  destined  to  spread 
a  somewhat  similar  dismay  in  the  ranks  of  his 
friends.  He  did  not,  of  course,  become  a  Tory  as 
his  great  contemporary  became  a  Liberal,  though 
there  were  elements  in  his  political  creed  which 
the  most  conservative  might  regard  complacently; 
and  no  man  of  his  day  was  more  outspoken  and 
fearless  in  his  exposure  of  the  vices  of  democracy. 
Nor  have  I  the  least  desire  to  claim  him  as  a  con- 
vert to  any  particular  religious  cult  or  sect.  There 
is  a  sense  in  which  he  remained  true  to  his  early 
training  until  the  end.  He  was  as  unsparing  in  his 
criticism  of  religious  as  of  philosophic  or  economic 
dogma;  but  no  man  of  his,  or  perhaps  of  any, 
generation  illustrated  better  the  fascination  of  re- 
ligion for  the  human  mind  or  the  hunger  of  the 
heart  for  God.  Grote  stood  more  exactly  in  the 
strict  Utilitarian  succession.  He  was  the  obedient 
son  of  the  family,  who  kept  not  only  its  laws  but 
its  tradition.  John  Mill  was  its  enfant  terrible, 
—  though  the  words  sound  like  sacrilege,  —  who, 


322  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

while  remaining  true  to  the  genuine  principle  of 
life  which  gave  to  Utilitarianism  and  the  experi- 
ence-philosophy such  validity  as  they  possessed, 
yet  scandalized  his  more  orthodox  brethren  by  the 
scant  respect  he  paid  to  the  family  conventions.* 

The  truth  is  that  Mill  was  far  too  great  a  man  to 
be  confined  within  the  strait  barriers  erected  by  his 
father  and  Bentham.  Consistent  in  his  belief  that 
all  knowledge  depends  upon  experience,  he  was 
clear-eyed  enough  to  see,  and  candid  enough  to 
admit,  that  there  is  an  experience  of  the  heart  as 
well  as  of  the  head,  and  that  life  demands  some  cul- 
ture of  the  feelings  as  well  as  of  the  reasoning  fac- 
ulties. He  discerned  too  that  thoughtful  people  are 
more  likely  to  be  right  in  what  they  affirm  than  in 
what  they  deny,  and  that  the  fatal  weakness  of  so- 
called  '  systems '  of  thought  lies  in  their  very  com- 
pleteness and  consistency,  inasmuch  as  truth  always 
proves  to  be  a  richer  and  more  varied  thing  than 
the  system-builder  fancies.  The  leaven  of  it  is  ever 
fermenting  in  the  logical  mass,  disarranging  its  neat 
categories,  and  contradicting  its  boasted  finality.^ 

*  The  brethren  who  suffered  most  were,  I  suppose,  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Grote  ;  but  I  keep  the  masculine  noun  in  memory  of  the  saying 
attributed  to  Samuel  Rogers,  that  he  always  enjoyed  "  dining  at 
their  house.  Mr.  Grote  was  so  ladylike,  and  Mrs.  Grote  was  such 
a  gentleman."  The  needful  pinch  of  salt  is  supplied  by  Rogers 
himself.  When  asked  by  some  one  why  he  said  so  many  disagree- 
able things,  he  answered,  "The  fact  is  I  have  a  very  weak  voice; 
and  unless  I  say  disagreeable  things  nobody  will  hear  me." 

2  Cf .  Mill's  Essay  on  Coleridge  ;  also  Tulloch,  Religious  Thought 
in  Britain^  p.  273  ;  and  MacCunn,  Six  Radical  Thinkers,  pp.  86-87. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  323 

Mr.  Benn  complains,  though  rather  in  sorrow  than 
in  anger,  that  although  Mill  had  thus  been  brought 
up  without  religious  belief  and  in  habitual  associa- 
tion with  unbeHevers,  he  showed  all  his  life  long  a 
"persistently  conciliatory"  attitude  toward  theo- 
logy.* The  further  insinuation  of  an  unduly  prudent 
truckling  to  popular  opinion  to  the  extent  of  con- 
cealing his  views  in  order  to  save  his  influence  if 
not  his  office,  seems  to  me  quite  unworthy.^  It  is 
not  cowardice  which  leads  a  man  whose  views  are  in 
the  process  of  formation  to  avoid  thrftsting  them 
violently  down  his  neighbour's  throat.  Such  a  pro- 
ceeding forbids  all  hope  of  legitimate  acceptance  and 
assimilation ;  it  assures  misunderstanding  and  justi- 
fiable resentment.  If  the  principles  of  a  man's  phi- 
losophy or  theology  are  candidly  avowed,  there  is  no 
dishonesty,  but  only  common  decency  and  sense  in 
keeping  conclusions  to  himself  until  he  is  assured 
that  they  are  conclusions  indeed  instead  of  wayside 
fancies.  No  one  can  say  that  Mill  ever  hesitated  to 
proclaim  the  principles  which  guided  his  thought ; 
or  that  he  feared  to  stand  for  unpopular  views  which 
were  clearly  right  in  his  eyes.  But  he  was  too  true 
a  philosopher  to  treat  with  mere  easy  contempt  con- 
victions which  had  entered  deep  into  the  life  expe- 
rience of  multitudes  of  his  intelligent  fellow-men. 

It  is  easy  to  imagine  the  dissatisfaction  of  his  fa- 
ther with  some  of  the  companions  whom  John  Mill 

*  Benn,  History  of  English  Rationalisnif  vol.  i,  p.  439. 
'  Op.  cit,  p.  441  and  elsewhere. 


S94  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

found  in  the  Utilitarian  and  Speculative  Societies ; 
and  it  is  by  no  means  difficult  to  understand  Mrs. 
Grote's  evident  desire  to  box  his  ears  when,  to  the 
scandal  of  the  straiter  members  of  the  Bentham- 
ite sect,  he  suddenly  appeared  as  an  expositor  of 
the  philosophy  of  Coleridge.  The  brilliant  disciple 
had  broken  his  leading  strings;  and  though  a  Util- 
itarian still,  had  entered  into  strange  relations  with 
idealism  and  the  poetry  of  Wordsworth,  which  to 
the  Grotes  were  as  the  daughters  of  Heth  to  Isaac 
and  Eebekah. 

More  than  this,  he  fell  into  an  incorrigible  habit 
of  using  the  phrases  and  forms  of  religious  expres- 
sion to  illustrate  his  experience  or  to  bring  home  his 
teachings.  The  period  of  mental  stress  through 
which  he  passed  in  the  winter  of  1826-7  was  marked 
by  something  which  he  chose  to  compare  to  '  convic- 
tion of  sin.'  Ambition  failed,  the  imagined  realiza- 
tion of  his  dreams  lost  its  charm,  life  became  dull, 
vacuous,  and  poor  in  significance.  No  doubt  reac- 
tion from  the  extraordinary  strain  to  which  his  mind 
had  been  subjected  during  almost  the  entire  period 
of  childhood  and  adolescence  was  the  immediate  oc- 
casion of  this  crisis  ;  but  none  the  less  was  it  a  spirit- 
ual crisis.  Mr.  Birrell  has  somewhere  exclaimed  over 
the  fact  that  of  all  books,  Marmontel's  Memoirs 
should  have  opened  the  flood-gates  of  Mill's  long- 
pent  feelings,  and  thus  become  the  instrument  of 
his  ^  conversion' ;  for  in  a  psychological  if  not  a  tech- 
nically religious  sense  a  conversion  it  seems  to  have 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  325 

been.  But  the  reader  of  the  "  Autobiography  "  will 
remember  that  the  particular  passage  which  brought 
Mill  peace  related  to  the  young  Marmontel's  deci- 
sion, upon  the  death  of  his  father,  to  do  what  he 
might  by  devotion  and  self-sacrifice  to  supply  the 
family  loss.  This  is  an  essentially  religious  motive, 
and  its  appeal  to  Mill  is  significant.  Marmontel's 
^  inspiration '  —  the  word  is  Mill's  —  proved  conta- 
gious. It  not  only  brought  tears  to  his  reader's  eyes 
but  awakened  a  new  life  in  his  heart.  Wordsworth's 
poetry  helped  to  develop  and  enrich  the  new  elements 
thus  introduced  into  experience  and  to  encourage 
that  '  conciliatory  attitude '  toward  religion  over 
which  the  faithful  still  grieve ;  even  as  they  grieve 
over  Comte's  worship  of  the  memory  of  "  Clotilde," 
and  Buckle's  persistence  in  holding  with  "  passion- 
ate conviction  "  (the  phrase  is  Mr.  Benn's)  to  the 
immortality  of  the  soul.  As  life  went  on  this  reli- 
gious note  —  or  semi-religious,  if  the  reader  please, 
since  I  would  not  claim  too  much  —  deepened. 
Critical  as  ever  of  specific  dogmas,  the  language 
not  of  religion  merely  but  of  Christianity  seems  to 
have  become  an  instinctive  resource  in  some  of  his 
most  significant  utterances ;  as  for  instance  in  the 
letter  to  Miss  Fox  in  which  he  urges  the  impossi- 
bility of  rendering  worthy  service  to  one's  age  ex- 
cept a  man  resolve  "  to  take  up  his  cross  and  bear 
it." ' 

With  his  marriage  Mill's  deeper  life,  which  his 
1  Cf.  MacCunn,  Six  Radical  Thinkers^  p.  58. 


326  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

father  had  done  so  much  to  starve,  and  which 
he  himself  had  repressed  until  he  seemed  to  Car- 
lyle  like  a  logic-chopping  machine  and  to  some  of 
his  more  vulgar  contemporaries  like  a  "book  in 
breeches,"  came  to  its  own ;  and  his  wife's  death 
seven  years  later  left  him  a  memory  which,  he  tells 
us,  became  a  religion.  Theological  speculation  seems 
to  have  made  an  increasing  appeal  to  him,  and  when, 
after  his  death,  the  "  Three  Essays  on  Religion  " 
appeared,  the  world  realized  how  far  he  had  wan- 
dered from  the  grace  of  utilitarian  orthodoxy.  With 
engaging  and  characteristic  candour  Lord  Mor- 
ley,  in  his  review  of  these  essays,  admits  that  the 
author's  conclusions,  and  "  what  is  even  more  impor- 
tant, the  spirit  of  the  conclusions,  are  a  rather  keen 
surprise."  This  was  more  than  thirty  years  ago  ;  but 
Lord  Morley's  distinction  is  still  valid.  It  is  the  spirit 
of  the  essays,  rather  than  their  specific  conclusions, 
which  is  significant.  They  are  as  sternly  critical  as 
ever  of  commonly  received  theological  notions ;  but 
their  trend  toward  religion  is  unmistakable.  Not 
only  does  Mill  emphasize  its  place  and  value  in  his- 
tory ;  he  goes  further  in  stating  with  clearness  and 
cogency  the  distinction  between  positive  and  nega- 
tive truth  and  the  general  value  of  the  former  for 
the  satisfaction  of  man's  deeper  needs.  His  purpose 
thus  becomes  constructive  and  he  casts  about  to  dis- 
cover and  coordinate  such  religious  experiences  and 
beliefs  as  may  prove  their  right  to  live.  Into  that 
discussion  we  have  no  time  to  follow  him ;  suffice 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  327 

it  to  say  that  he  finds  a  place  if  not  a  necessity 
for  religion  among  the  highest  human  activities ; 
that  Theism  becomes  under  his  hand  a  term  with 
real,  even  though  limited,  content ;  that  the  Argu- 
ment from  Design  is  exalted  to  a  position  of  influ- 
ence and  dignity  which  must  ever  place  these  essays 
under  the  ban  of  orthodox  'rationalists ' ;  ^  that  he 
discovers  room  in  the  world  for  such  a  messenger 
as  Christ  charged  with  an  express  mission  "  to  lead 
mankind  to  truth  and  virtue  "  ;  and  that  it  would 
be  difficult  "  even  for  an  unbeliever  to  find  a  better 
translation  of  the  rule  of  virtue  from  the  abstract 
into  the  concrete,  than  to  endeavour  so  to  live  that 
Christ  would  approve  our  life."  ^ 

Disraeli,  with  a  flippancy  and  presumption  which 
were  all  the  more  characteristic  because  they  may 
in  this  instance  have  been  unconscious,  once  pro- 
claimed himself  "  upon  the  side  of  the  angels."  Mill 
in  these  three  essays  comes  near  to  doing  the  same 
thing,  though  with  this  difference  :  that  his  sincerity 
and  reverence  for  all  true  and  noble  things  leaves  us 
in  far  less  doubt  as  to  his  fitness  for  their  company. 

While  Mill  and  his  circle  were  thus  working  out 
the  conclusions  of  philosophical  radicalism,  vast  so- 
cial and  economic  changes  were  taking  place  in  Eng- 

*  I  am  prepared  to  sympathize  with  not  a  little  rationalistic  criti- 
cism of  Mill's  application  of  the  argument  ;  but  onlj  because  of 
my  conviction  that  the  development  of  science  since  his  day  has 
given  to  it  a  validity  and  scope  which  makes  his  use  of  it  seem 
meagre. 

»  Three  Essays  on  Religion^  *'  Theism,"  part  v,  p.  255,  Amer.  ed. 


328  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

land.  True  to  their  traditions  and  to  their  genius 
for  the  via  media,  Englishmen  were  assimilating 
the  results  of  the  Revolution  even  while  they  con- 
demned its  methods.  We  have  caught  a  glimpse  of 
the  reforms  of  the  century's  first  three  decades  in 
an  earlier  chapter.  The  Reform  Bill  introduced  a 
new  era  of  economic  and  social,  as  distinguished  from 
mere  political,  development.  Fifty  years  were  yet 
to  elapse  before  suffrage  should  become  practically 
universal ;  but  the  principle  involved  was  granted 
and  progress  toward  democracy  was  henceforth  in- 
evitable. No  less  inevitable  was  it  that  the  masses 
of  the  people,  as  soon  as  they  were  assured  of  politi- 
cal rights,  should  go  on  to  demand  an  uplift  of  their 
economic  and  social  status.  It  is  doubtful  if  we  yet 
realize  how  profound  and  far-reaching  were  the  ele- 
ments of  social  change  contained  in  the  agitation 
for  Free  Trade,  the  growth  of  the  great  factory  dis- 
tricts, the  passage  of  the  Factory  Acts,  the  rise  and 
development  of  Trade  Unions,  Chartism,  and  the 
Cooperative  Movement,  together  with  the  crusade 
against  slavery  which,  in  the  United  States,  over- 
shadowed all  other  questions. 

These  movements  are  all  more  or  less  vividly  re- 
flected in  the  books  of  the  day,  although  so  far 
as  this  literature  related  itself  immediately  to  the 
passing  phase  of  a  social  question  it  was  generally 
ephemeral.  Cobbett,  for  instance,  is  little  likely  to 
be  read  to-day  for  anything  he  said  as  a  political 
and  social  radical ;  though  his  spirited  sketches  of 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  329 

English  woods  and  fields  are  as  vivid  as  ever.  Dust 
and  oblivion  might  threaten  even  "  Uncle  Tom's 
Cabin  "  were  it  not  for  the  perennial  elements  of 
human  tragedy  and  comedy  which  it  contains.  All 
these  great  movements  made  their  appeal  to  reli- 
gion, and  most  of  them  voiced  their  protest  against 
what  seemed  to  the  agitators  to  be  the  apathy  and 
indifference  of  the  Church.  Cobbett,  who  of  course 
touched  this  period  only  at  its  beginning,  is  loud  in 
his  denunciation  of  the  "  Hampshire  Parsons,"  with 
their  Toryism  and  predilection  for  vested  rights. 
Ebenezer  Elliott,  the  Corn-Law  Rhymer,  introduces 
a  telling  irony  into  the  pious  resignation  of  his  song, 
—  to  the  tune  of  "  Robin  Adair,"  — 

Child,  is  thy  father  dead  ? 

Father  is  gone  ! 
Why  did  they  tax  his  hread  ? 

God's  will  be  done  ! 
Mother  has  sold  her  bed  ; 
Better  to  die  than  wed  ! 
Where  shall  she  lay  her  head  ? 

Home  we  have  none  !  ^ 

Thomas  Cooper,  the  Chartist  poet,  imprisoned  for 
conspiracy  and  sedition,  became  a  skeptic  during  his 
confinement,  and  went  out  upon  his  release  as  an 
apostle  of  unbelief.  These  men  and  the  tone  of  their 
protest  may  be  taken  as  representative  of  a  cer- 
tain type  of  religious  and  poHtical  radicalism.  Yet 
upon  the  other  hand  is  to  be  noted  the  fact  that 

*  Works,  edited  by  his  Son,  vol.  i,  p.  381. 


330  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

such  reforms  as  they  advocated  have  never  failed 
to  make  their  appeal  to  religion  finally,  or  to  find 
among  believing  men  their  most  faithful  and  stead- 
fast champions.  It  is  of  the  essence  of  faith  to  be 
constructive;  and  a  careless  or  frightened  —  and 
therefore  cruel  —  world  listens  sometimes  to  the 
voice  of  the  reformer  who  is  bent  upon  ultimate 
construction  when  it  would  arm  itself  against  the 
mere  revolutionist.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that 
the  influences  of  permanent  beneficence  exerted  dur- 
ing this  period  generally  related  themselves  to  the 
sources  of  faith  rather  than  of  unbelief.  Among 
the  aristocracy,  no  one  gave  himself  more  whole- 
heartedly to  the  service  of  the  forlorn  and  needy 
than  Lord  Ashley,  afterward  Earl  of  Shaftesbury, 
an  Evangelical  of  Evangelicals.  It  avails  little  to 
reply  that  he  was  a  Tory  and  generally  out  of  sym- 
pathy with  the  political  aspirations  of  the  poor ;  and 
that  some  of  his  methods  savour  too  much  of  institu- 
tionalism  and  patronage.  The  fact  remains  that  he 
probably  did  as  much  as  any  man  of  his  generation, 
as  he  certainly  did  more  than  any  man  of  rank,  to, 
fasten  the  attention  of  his  countrymen  upon  the 
needs  of  the  dependent  classes.  Ebenezer  Elliott  was 
a  man  of  piety ;  while  Cooper,  who  before  his  prison 
experiences  of  Strauss  and  skepticism  had  been  a 
preacher,  subsequently  recanted  his  skeptical  opin- 
ions and  utterances,  became  a  convinced  believer, 
and  a  Baptist  minister.  Mrs.  Gaskell,  who  knew  at 
first  hand  the  lot  of  the  poor  and  the  mingled  feel- 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  331 

ings  of  bitterness  and  hope  which  animated  the 
early  Trade-Unionists,  makes  much  of  the  religious 
element  in  "Mary  Barton."  Kingsley's  "Yeast" 
and  "Alton  Locke,"  together  with  his  essays  and 
speeches  upon  social  topics,  are  saturated  with  reli- 
gion. Cobden,  while  primarily,  of  course,  a  practical 
politician  and  economist,  was  no  stranger  to  those 
ideals  which  relate  themselves  intimately  to  the  re- 
ligious life.  He  is  commonly  regarded  as  the  pro- 
tagonist of  the  Manchester  School  and,  ipso  facto y 
a  somewhat  mitigated  Mr.  Gradgrind.  In  point  of 
fact  he  was  a  paladin  chivalrously  bent  upon  the 
delivery  of  a  captive.  Trade,  whom  his  imagination 
endowed  with  the  charms  and  graces  as  well  as  the 
wrongs  of  an  imprisoned  princess.  He  was  zealous 
in  repudiating  the  charge  that  his  eye  was  fixed 
solely  upon  the  '  main  chance.'  He  maintained  that, 
while  the  material  gain  from  the  success  of  his 
principle  must  be  great,  the  moral  gain  would  be 
so  much  greater  as  to  reduce  it  to  relative  insig- 
nificance. "I  see,"  he  said  in  1846,  "in  the  Free 
Trade  principle  that  which  shall  act  on  the  moral 
world  as  the  principle  of  gravitation  in  the  uni- 
verse—  drawing  men  together,  thrusting  aside  the 
antagonism  of  race  and  creed  and  language,  and 
uniting  us  in  the  bonds  of  eternal  peace."  ^ 

Mazzini's  long  residence  in  England,  his  intimate 

*  I  am  indebted  for  this  quotation  as  well  as  for  several  sugges- 
tions upon  the  influence  of  Mill,  Cobden,  and  especially  Mazzini,  to 
the  admirable  essays  of  Professor  John  MacCunn,  recently  published 
under  the  title  Six  Radical  Thinkers.  See  p.  121. 


332  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

association  with  many  British  writers,  and  the  large 
influence  exerted  by  his  genius  for  literature  as  well 
as  politics  forbid  that  we  should  pass  him  by  in  si- 
lence. Certain  elements  in  his  radicalism,  such  as 
his  apology  for  political  assassination  and  his  refusal 
to  give  any  countenance  to  the  policies  of  Cavour 
because  the  Italian  unity  toward  which  they  looked 
was  monarchical  rather  than  republican,  were  too  ex- 
treme and  doctrinaire  to  enlist  Anglo-Saxon  sympa- 
thy. They  savoured  too  much  of  the  uncompromis- 
ing spirit  animating  extreme  Abolitionists  in  New 
England  to  appeal  to  British  or  even  to  American 
conservatism.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  Mazzini's  con- 
viction that  if  democracy  were  first  to  triumph  and 
then  to  endure  it  must  be  through  its  recognition 
of  religious  obligation  and  its  acceptance  of  faith, 
was  of  a  sort  to  win  a  much  quicker  and  heartier  as- 
sent among  English-speaking  peoples  than  upon  the 
Continent.  He  was  far  enough  from  being  an  ortho- 
dox Churchman.  But  there  is  no  reason  to  doubt 
that  the  motto  "  God  and  the  People  "  represented 
his  creed  as  well  as  his  war-cry ;  and  that  his  alle- 
giance to  the  former  article  was  as  loyal  as  to  the  lat- 
ter. He  was  as  like  Carlyle  in  his  dependence  upon 
intuition,  and  his  hatred  of  the  balder  forms  of  Utili- 
tarianism, as  he  was  unlike  him  in  his  fellow-feeling 
for  the  aspirations  and  ambitions  of  the  masses.  Rus- 
kin  and  Carlyle  could  have  counted  upon  him  in 
their  protest  against  what  the  former  calls  Mill's 
substitution  of  patriotism  for  religion. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  333 

"Actually,"  cried  Carlyle,  "  the  most  paltry  rag 
of  "  —  here  followed  a  stream  of  vituperation  too 
rapid  for  Ruskin  to  note  —  "  it  has  fallen  to  my  lot 
to  come  in  with.  Among  my  aquaintance  I  have  not 
seen  a  person  talking  of  a  thing  he  so  little  undei> 
stood." ' 

Utilitarianism  was  not  calculated  to  produce  he- 
roes, —  though  in  the  famous  passage  from  the 
"Examination  of  Sir  William  Hamilton's  Philoso- 
phy "  where  Mill  professes  his  determination  to  go 
to  Hell  rather  than  enter  Heaven  at  the  price  of  his 
convictions,  there  is  a  note  of  the  heroic,  —  and 
Mazzini  was  as  romantic  in  his  love  of  heroes  as 
Carlyle ;  indeed,  from  his  exhortations  to  the  Ro- 
man Republic  in  1849,  and  to  the  United  States 
in  1854,  it  would  seem  as  though  his  mind  dwelt  as 
fondly  upon  the  development  of  hero-states  as  of 
individual  hero-men.  His  better  known  writings  not 
only  have  this  ethical  and  religious  complexion ; 
they  have  a  hortatory  if  not  a  homiletic  form.  Be- 
hind the  Old  Testament  directness  and  fervour  of 
his  prophecy  there  was  a  conviction  corresponding 
to  the  Hebrew  ^  Thus  saith  the  Lord.'  If  it  hoped 
to  succeed,  democracy  must  find  its  ground  in 
theism,  and  if  it  were  to  endure  it  must  keep  the 
faith.^ 

The  radicalism  of  which  we  have  been  speaking 
in  the  field  of  philosophy  and  politics  had  its  coun- 

*  PrcRterita,  vol.  ii,  chap.  xii. 

»  MacCunn,  Six  Radical  Thinkers^  pp.  191, 196,  209  sqq. 


'  ^334  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

terpart  in  a  liberal  movement  within  the  Church  of 
England.  The  so-called  Early  Oriel  School  had  been 
its  forerunner.  Men  like  Whately,  Hampden,  and 
Arnold,  the  betes  noires  of  the  Catholic  party,  had 
fostered  it.  Milman,  in  his  "  History  of  the  Jews  '* 
and  "Latin  Christianity,"  had  gone  beyond  his  pre- 
decessors and  sacrificed  ecclesiastical  preferment  by 
venturing  to  call  Abraham  "a  sheik."  Mansel  — 
though  himself  a  Tory  and  far  from  sympathetic 
toward  either  the  Low  or  the  Broad  Church  —  in 
his  famous  Bampton  Lectures  was  at  once  admitting 
the  change  which  impended  in  religious  thought, 
and,  by  the  use  of  Sir  William  Hamilton's  philosophy, 
unwittingly  forging  blades  for  later  agnostic  sword- 
play.  Baden  Powell  in  his  "  Unity  of  Worlds," 
"  Christianity  without  Judaism,"  and  "  The  Order 
of  Nature  "  was  anticipating,  though  with  less  op- 
position and  alarm  on  the  part  of  conservatives  than 
might  have  been  expected,  many  of  the  chief  con- 
troversies of  the  third  quarter  of  the  century.  Jowett 
and  Stanley  were  meanwhile  introducing  the  results 
of  German  criticism  and  philosophy,  the  one  by 
means  of  his  commentaries  and  the  other  by  his  ex- 
ceedingly popular  work  in  the  realm  of  Jewish  and 
Christian  history. 

Perhaps  the  greatest  mediating  influence,  how- 
ever, between  Religion  and  Literature  during  this 
period  was  Frederick  Denison  Maurice.  His  own 
work  was  in  the  main  too  distinctively  theological 
to  be  classed  under  the  head  of  general  literature. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  335 

Indeed  he  gloried  in  a  term  which  many  religious 
writers  prefer  to  thrust  into  the  background,  and 
openly  preferred  the  word  '  theology '  to  '  religion/ 
since  the  latter,  as  he  maintained,  savoured  a  little 
of  paganism.  But  he  was  the  heir  of  Coleridge  in 
things  religious  and  philosophical,  and  wherever  the 
leaven  of  Coleridge's  influence  has  had  fair  chance 
to  work,  some  of  the  results  have  always  found  true 
and  often  high  literary  expression.  Maurice's  early 
novel,  "Eustace  Conway,"  seems  scarcely  to  have 
won  notice  enough  to  justify  a  critic  in  saying  that 
it  has  been  forgotten ;  and  eveu  his  best-known 
writings  are,  I  suppose,  little  read  to-day.  They  lack 
the  universal  quality  which  in  "  The  Confessions  of 
an  Inquiring  Spirit "  and  "  Aids  to  Keflection,"  as 
well  as  in  parts  of  the  "  Biographia  Literaria,"  still 
makes  its  quick  appeal  to  the  modern  man.  Bred  a 
Unitarian  and  passing  thence  in  his  early  maturity 
into  the  communion  and  service  of  the  Established 
Church,  Maurice's  work  reflects  his  surroundings.  It 
is  marked,  if  not  marred,  by  a  certain  institutional 
habit  of  mind.  His  famous  book  on  the  Kingdom 
of  Christ,  for  instance,  bears  as  its  sub-title,  "  Hints 
on  the  Principles,  Ordinances,  and  Constitution  of 
the  Catholic  Church,  in  Letters  to  a  Member  of  the 
Society  of  Friends."  On  the  other  hand,  he  main- 
tained with  steadfastness  and  distinguished  ability 
certain  principles  of  immediate  fitness  to  the  need 
of  the  time,  and  capable  of  application  to  the  need 
of  all  times.  Many  men  of  deeply  religious  nature 


336  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

found  themselves  in  a  strait  between  the  hardness 
of  Evangelical  Calvinism  and  the  artificiality  of  the 
new  sacerdotalism  for  which  the  Oxford  Movement 
stood.  For  them  Maurice  had  a  genuine  gospel.  Nor 
did  he  fail  to  influence  John  Mill  in  a  degree  suffi- 
cient abundantly  to  justify  his  father's  fears. 

One  of  the  two  great  ideas  which  gave  him  power 
may  be  found  set  forth  in  a  letter  written  in  De- 
cember, 1833,  to  his  mother,  who  had  passed  from 
the  family  Unitarianism  into  the  position  of  a  some- 
what extreme  Calvinist.  In  it  he  argues  that,  instead 
of  being  an  object  of  God's  just  anger  because  of 
his  inherited  sinfulness,  "every  man  is  in  Christ," 
and  has  but  to  claim  and  make  his  own  a  heritage 
of  blessing.  The  second  principle  related  to  the 
brotherhood  of  believers.  Like  many  converts  to  a 
highly  organized  and  historic  church,  Maurice  had 
no  liking  for  Dissent  and  could  be  eloquent  if  not 
bitter  against  what  he  thought  to  be  schism.  But 
he  was  no  worshipper  of  conformity  for  its  own  sake. 
The  basis  of  unity  was  to  be  discovered  in  the  posi- 
tive elements  common  to  the  faith  of  all  Christians. 
Wherever  truth  was  found,  though  it  had  been  never 
so  sadly  twisted  to  a  sectarian  purpose,  something 
of  its  positive  and  universal  character  could  still  be 
discerned,  developed,  and  redeemed.^  Here  were  the 
elements  of  a  liberality  at  once  rational  and  reli- 
gious, which  might  not  only  make  it  possible  for 
men  of  different  theological  views  to  live  together, 

»  Cf.  Tulloch,  Religious  Thought  in  Britain,  pp.  269-278. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  337 

but  had  no  less  direct  a  bearing  upon  the  new  world 
of  rapidly  developing  science  and  the  old  world  of 
sadly  sick  society.  "  Nature  and  life  were  from  God 
at  a  time  when  science  on  the  one  hand  and  asceti- 
cism on  the  other  tended  to  sever  them  from  His 
presence."  ^ 

It  is  easy  to  discern  how  such  a  teacher  as  this, 
anointed  as  he  was  with  a  true  prophet's  unction, 
should  have  stirred  the  hearts  of  men  like  Kings- 
ley,  Thomas  Hughes,  and  Robertson.  He  thus  be- 
came a  chief  power  in  the  movement  known  as 
"  Christian  Socialism,"  although  he  would  not 
own  the  name  and  disliked  even  the  semblance  of 
founding  a  school  or  sect.  From  him  and  his  disci- 
ples may  be  traced  an  influence  which  has  not  only 
embodied  itself  in  many  institutions  of  the  '  social 
settlement'  type,  but  has  proved  to  be  a  vital 
motive  in  literature  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic. 
In  America,  moreover,  it  is  safe  to  say  that  the 
reinterpreters  of  religious  thought  who  have  given 
to  their  writings  at  once  a  positive  tone  and  a 
literary  form, — men  like  Mulford  and  T.  T.  Hun- 
ger, —  would  accord  to  Maurice  a  chief  place 
among  their  sources  of  inspiration ;  while  the  rank 
and  file  of  preachers  of  the  more  cultivated  type 
owe  him  as  real  a  debt,  although,  as  years  have 
passed,  his  message  has  most  often  reached  them 
at  second  hand. 

Horace  Bushnell  and  James  Martineau  deserve 

»  Op.  cit.,  p.  294. 


338  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

to  be  mentioned  with  him,  although  each  is  sepa- 
rated from  the  other  as  he  is  from  Maurice  by 
gulfs  of  distinction.  Both  were  radicals,  but  of 
constructive  sympathy  and  purpose.  Both,  in  the 
best  sense  of  a  dubious  word,  were  rhetoricians,  and 
developed  to  a  high  degree  of  perfection  styles  of 
marked  individuality,  which  were  not  only  singu- 
larly fitted  for  the  task  of  self-expression,  but  in 
themselves  would  possess  great  value  as  objects  of 
study  were  it  not  for  their  fatal  tendency  to  in- 
duce imitation.  It  was  the  happy  lot  of  both  these 
writers  to  help  deliver  their  fellows  from  the 
tyranny  of  the  set  phrase.  Both  became  in  turn 
the  authors  of  phrases  as  haunting  as  anything  in 
St.  Augustine's  "Confessions"  or  Newman's  Ser- 
mons. "  Low  grades  of  being  want  low  objects ; 
but  the  want  of  man  is  God,"  is  Bushnell's  paral- 
lel to  St.  Augustine's  "Thou  hast  made  us  for 
Thyself " ;  while  Martineau's  "  God  has  so  ar- 
ranged the  chronometry  of  our  spirits  that  there 
shall  be  a  thousand  silent  moments  between  the 
striking  hours,"  reflects  life  well  enough  to  have 
been  chosen  by  Mr.  Eden  Phillpotts  for  the  name- 
text  of  a  characteristic  book.  Bushnell  was  further- 
more a  student  of  the  philosophy  of  human  speech, 
and  the  "  Dissertation  on  Language,"  with  which  he 
introduced  one  of  his  most  influential  works,  de- 
serves a  far  wider  reading  than  it  has  ever  had.  Its 
doctrine  of  the  symbolic  nature  of  all  speech,  while 
in  one  sense  it  is  evident  enough  to  be  generally 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  339 

recognized,  finds  in  his  hands  its  psychological 
application  to  the  common  needs  of  literature  and 
religion.  Bushnell  recognized  as  few  theologians 
have  done  the  poetic  elements  in  religion  and  the 
essentially  tentative  character  of  religious  speech. 
A  man  with  so  discerning  an  eye  and  so  rich  an 
experience  could  not  permit  his  theology  —  to  say 
nothing  of  his  religion — to  degenerate  into  a  mere 
exercise  in  definition. 

The  fact  that  so  many  of  the  apologists  and  the 
assailants  of  Christianity  have  agreed  to  regard  it 
as  a  system  of  doctrines  authoritatively  given, 
highly  developed,  and  capable  not  only  of  exact  but 
of  final  definition,  is  accountable  for  the  major 
part  of  religious  controversy.  This  was  eminently 
true  of  the  warfare  accompanying  the  Unitarian 
schism  in  New  England  early  in  last  century.  The 
Unitarians  were  right  in  their  protest  against  the 
elaborate  and  artificial  scheme  whereby  the  ortho- 
dox undertook  not  merely  to  account  for,  but  to 
label  and  docket,  the  inscrutable  thoughts  of  God 
and  the  multiplied  needs  of  man.  They  were  wrong 
in  carrying  their  protest  so  far  as  often  to  give  a 
negative  complexion  to  their  whole  attitude  and 
sometimes  to  throw  contempt  upon  religion  as  an 
experience.  The  question  might  indeed  be  raised 
whether  this  overdoing  of  their  Protestantism 
which  resulted  in  a  semi-starvation  of  the  religfious 
nature  has  not  been  accountable  for  the  grotesque 
and  weird  radicalisms  that  in  some  parts  of  Amer- 


340  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ica  have  threatened  to  make  their  societies  veri- 
table Caves  of  Adullam ;  since  it  is  a  pretty  well 
recognized  principle  of  experience  that  religious 
neglect  results  in  the  perversion  rather  than  the 
death  of  the  religious  faculty,  and  that  the  ulti- 
mate choice  lies,  not  between  belief  and  no-belief, 
but  between  faith  and  superstition/ 

The  orthodox,  on  the  other  hand,  were  for  a  time 
incited  to  renewed  fervour  of  definition  and  to 
greater  elaboration  of  system.  Here  they  were  hope- 
lessly wrong,  just  as  they  were  fundamentally  right 
in  maintaining  that  religion  was  a  great  individual 
and  social  experience,  to  be  defined  anew  in  terms 
of  each  man's  speech  and  of  each  generation's  cor- 
porate life.  They  were  right  too  in  their  belief  that 
religion  is  essentially  an  outreaching  and  adventur- 
ous experience,  which  must  decay  if  the  spirit  of 
adventure  languish.  Hence  sprung  their  missionary 
activity,  which,  as  I  have  already  indicated,  is  likely 
ultimately  to  be  one  of  the  distinctive  and  outstand- 
ing marks  of  the  century.  It  has  already  produced 
very  considerable  results  in  the  way  of  contributions 
to  the  literature  of  geography,  ethnology,  language, 
and  general  science.  As  the  period  of  crude  misun- 
derstanding and  contempt  of  missionary  enterprise 

*  I  would  not  seem  to  imply  that  the  better  qualified  Unitarian 
leaders  have  ever  welcomed  the  conditions  here  referred  to;  my 
impression  is  that  they  have,  at  least  among  themselves,  acknow- 
ledged them  as  dangers  incident  to  their  history  and  position  as  a 
radical  party.  Of  late  the  positive  and  oonstructive  note  has  been 
sounded  far  more  clearly. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  341 

passes  and  the  generally  high  quality,  not  only  of 
the  adventure  itself  hut  of  the  men  and  women  who 
undertake  it,  appears,  the  vast  literary  possibilities 
which  it  presents  are  bound  to  make  themselves 
manifest.  Practical  idealism  has  always  been  and  is 
likely  still  to  prove  the  prolific  mother  of  literature. 
The  idealism  of  the  mystic  is  often  too  vague  and 
undefined  to  submit  to  the  forms  necessary  for  lit- 
erary expression.  But  let  the  Quaker,  for  instance, 
enter  upon  some  genuine  quest  which  compels  him 
into  militancy,  as  did  George  Fox  when  upon  the 
saner  of  his  preaching  tours  and  in  his  protests 
against  crying  social  evils,  or  as  Whittier  did  when 
championing  the  abolition  of  slavery  ;  or  let  him  be 
touched  by  the  spirit  of  some  great  historic  church 
as  Shorthouse  was  before  he  wrote  " John  Inglesant," 
and  his  mystic  idealism  becomes  at  once  a  source 
and  instrument  of  literary  power.  On  the  other  hand, 
a  somewhat  similar  phenomenon  appears  when  ideal- 
ism, which  has  long  been  at  once  nourished  and  re- 
pressed within  the  borders  of  a  fixed  system,  finds 
its  bonds  broken  and  its  wings  set  free.  In  the  realm 
of  ideas,  as  in  that  of  hydraulics,  a  measure  of  re- 
pression is  necessary  to  significant  and  useful  ex- 
pression ;  the  place  for  the  wheel  lying  at  the  foot 
of  the  penstock. 

The  most  fruitful  period  in  the  history  of  Ameri- 
can letters  illustrates  what  I  mean.  Emerson,  Bry- 
ant, Hawthorne,  Longfellow,  Whittier,  Lowell,  and 
Holmes  were  all  New  England  men.  All,  with  the 


342  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

possible  exception  of  Whittier,  and  in  his  case  the 
exception  is  apparent  rather  than  real,  were  heirs  to 
the  Puritan  heritage.  Their  forefathers'  Calvinism 
had,  to  be  sure,  become  greatly  mitigated  on  its  way 
to  them.  Its  husk  had  burst,  but  its  kernel  was  yet 
sound.  Emerson  was  not  only  a  minister,  but  the 
son  of  generations  of  ministers ;  and  although  his 
opinions  were  too  radical  even  for  the  Unitarians 
whom  he  set  himself  to  serve,  a  New  England  Con- 
gregational minister  of  the  better  type  he  remained 
all  his  life  long,  in  his  serene  dignity,  his  humour, 
his  independence,  his  interest  in  local  civic  afPairs, 
his  essential  piety,  and  his  keen  regard  for  the  ethi- 
cal values  of  life.^  Holmes,  also  a  minister's  son, 
seems  to  have  been  the  only  one  of  the  company 
whose  revolt  from  Calvinism  was  marked  by  any 
bitterness,  and  his  bitterness  is  that  of  a  humour- 
ist whose  sense  of  the  ludicrous  I  believe  to  have 
been  a  legitimate  Puritan  heirloom. 

These  men  were  delivered  from  the  tyranny  of 
the  Calvinistic  forms  of  thought.  They  profited  in- 
expressibly, however,  by  the  fact  that  the  thought 
which  these  forms  first  strove  to  express,  and  finally 
threatened  to  smother,  was  of  a  very  real  and  in- 

^  This  fact  has  recently  been  interestingly  and  repeatedly  em- 
phasized by  Prof.  Woodberry.  It  is  also  to  be  remembered  that 
Emerson's  official  service  in  the  churches,  which  is  commonly  sup- 
posed to  have  ended  on  his  withdrawal  from  his  Boston  pulpit, 
really  outlasted  that  event  by  a  considerable  time.  He  preached 
often  in  New  Bedford,  and  for  some  three  years  supplied  a  church 
in  East  Lexinirtou. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  343 

tense  sort.  For  generations  it  had  concerned  itself 
with  matters  of  great  and  sometimes  awful  import. 
However  cramped  the  conclusions  at  which  it  arrived 
might  seem  to  be,  the  fields  through  which  it  ranged 
in  search  of  them  were  nobly  ample.  To  say,  as  we  are 
wont  to  do,  that  the  new  wine  of  this  generation 
burst  the  old  bottles,  is  to  do  violence  to  an  already 
sadly  overworked  figure.  The  old  forms  gave  way, 
to  be  sure,  but  only  that  the  wholesome  substance 
pent  in  by  them  might  reach  and  serve  a  larger 
world.  Calvinism  had  been  essentially  rationalistic, 
though  mysticism  of  a  repressed  type  was  always 
latent  in  it.  Emerson  seemed  to  throw  logic  to  the 
winds,  avowed  himself  to  be  a  frank  intuitionalist, 
and  spoke  often  with  the  voice  of  the  oracle  who  is  in 
mystic  and  immediate  communication  with  the  Source 
of  Truth.  Hence  comes  the  insufferably  irritating 
quahty  of  his  style  in  some  of  the  Essays,  where 
he  seems  to  patronize  God  and  Man  alike,  —  a  fault 
of  condescension  from  which  in  personal  intercourse 
he  was  beautifully  free,  —  and  yet  here  lay  no  doubt 
something  of  the  secret  of  his  power.  Calvinism 
furthermore  dealt  with  the  race,  and  with  man  as 
an  integral  element  in  it ;  endowing  him,  however, 
with  an  imperishable  individuality.  Emerson  is  du- 
bious of  personality  in  theory,  and  goes  far  at  times 
toward  dogmatic  denial  of  it;  but  yet — and  the 
contradiction  is  a  very  striking  one  —  he  was  one 
of  the  most  potent  forces  of  his  century  making  for 
the  integrity  and  autonomy  —  that  is,  the  true  free- 


344  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

dom  —  of  the  individual.  The  key  of  the  mystery 
is  to  be  most  hopefully  sought,  whether  it  is  to  be 
found  or  not,  in  the  fact  that  Emerson  was  no  sys- 
tematic philosopher,  but  only  a  man  as  profoundly 
conscious  of  a  nature  made  in  the  divine  image  as 
he  was  careless  of  mere  consistency.  Call  him  mystic, 
transcendentalist,  egoist,^  irrational  optimist,  what 
you  will  —  his  value  for  the  world  at  large  lies  in 
the  fact  that  after  all  he  is  so  incurably  religious. 
He  taught  the  youth  of  the  latter  half  of  his  cen- 
tury two  things  that  every  man  must  learn  before 
he  can  complete  his  life  :  first  self-reliance ;  second, 
God-reliance.^  The  one  question  which  made  him 
of  use  to  orthodox  and  heterodox  alike,  and  which 
he  was  always  asking,  is  simply  an  echo  of  Christ's 
great  inquiry,  "  What  shall  it  profit  a  man  if  he 
shall  gain  the  whole  world  and  lose  his  own  soul ; 
or  what  shall  a  man  give  in  exchange  for  his  soul?" 
The  spiritual  quality  of  the  work  of  Bryant, 
Whittier,  Longfellow,  and  Lowell  is  akin  to  that 
which  characterizes  Emerson.  They  are  less  tran- 
scendental and  more  specifically  Western,  as  con- 
trasted with  the  curiously  Oriental  type  of  mind 
and  style  which  Emerson  sometimes  reveals.  They 
move  more  naturally  in  the  realm  of  the  concrete 

*  One  of  the  finest  illustrations  in  literature  of  the  immemorial 
debate  between  Pot  and  Kettle  is  the  passage  in  which  Ruskin  crit- 
icises Emerson  on  the  ground  that  "  his  egoism  reiterates  itself  to 
provocation." 

2  Cf.  James  Freeman  Clarke,  Nineteenth  Century  Questions,  pp. 
278-279. 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  345 

and  the  particular.  Bryant's  faith  expressed  in  his 
"  To  a  Waterfowl/'  even  though  rather  limited  in 
content,  is  as  definite  as  it  is  beautifully  phrased. 
Whittier  found  precisely  the  stimulus  which  his 
gently  militant  nature  needed  in  championship  of 
the  unpopular  Abolitionist  cause.  His  muse  threat- 
ened to  prove  but  puerile  and  futile  until  it  was 
converted  to  the  service  of  fellow-man  as  well  as  to 
the  love  of  God.  Longfellow  is  the  most  consistently 
urbane  and  kindly  of  the  group,  moving  habitually 
upon  what  may  be  termed  the  domestic  plane.  His 
briefer  tales  are  fitted  to  their  setting  in  a  Wayside 
Inn;  "  Hiawatha"  and  "  Evangeline  "  to  the  family 
fireside ;  while  the  songs  which  have  sung  themselves 
around  the  world  and  made  him  one  of  the  most 
popular  of  poets  have  just  the  range  of  family  joys 
and  sorrows.  This  gentleness,  —  one  might  almost 
call  it  meekness,  —  which  holds  the  poet  in  its  gra- 
cious thrall  even  when  he  essays  semi-militant  themes, 
has  obscured  in  the  eyes  of  too  many  critics  his  real 
mastery  of  form.  A  trace  of  the  bully  is  inherent  in 
criticism,  which  loves  either  to  belabour  or  to  pat- 
ronize those  whom  it  is  not  forced  to  praise.  Few 
have  had  the  heart  to  offer  any  violence  to  Long- 
fellow ;  but  the  attitude  of  half-contemptuous  pat- 
ronage has  become  almost  a  fashion.  In  point  of 
fact  he  was  an  exceptionally  deft  craftsman,  whose 
imagination  supplied  him  with  material  of  high 
quality  and  whose  purity  of  heart  gave  to  his  work 
the  odour  of  a  genuine  sweetness  and  sanctity. 


341^  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"  Hiawatha  "  is  a  very  notable  achievement,  in  spite 
of  the  dreadful  facility  of  its  metre ;  and  there  is 
enough  of  the  divine  afflatus  in  "  Evansreline  "  to 
assure  it  a  good  old  age,  which  is  all  that  anything 
in  English  hexameters  should  dare  or  wish  to  ask  ; 
since  even  Kingsley,  who  had  the  deftest  hand, 
could  make  them  barely  tolerable.  Many  of  his  trans- 
lations are  among  the  best  in  the  language.  But 
after  all  this  has  been  said,  the  fact  remains  that 
the  hiding  of  Longfellow's  power  —  and  power  he 
has  —  Hes  in  his  discernment  of  the  secrets  of  the 
plain  man's  heart,  and  his  application  to  them  of 
the  appeal  of  conscience  and  the  comfort  of  reli- 
gion. 

LowelFs  speech  and  perhaps  his  faith  are  of  a 
somewhat  robuster  type.  Far  inferior  to  Longfellow 
in  his  sense  of  rhythm  and  the  deftness  of  his  handi- 
work in  verse, — like  Emerson  he  was  essentially  a 
master  of  prose,  —  and  not  quite  free  at  times  from 
the  taint  of  sentimentality,  he  is  upon  the  whole  an 
admirable  exponent  of  New  England  shrewdness, 
humour,  and  virile  right-mindedness.  The  "Big- 
low  Papers  "  are  unique.  Their  exaggeration  is  of 
the  sort  which  Dickens  employed  to  etch  his  types; 
Their  philosophy  and  their  use  of  whimsical  under- 
statement on  the  one  hand,  or  grotesque  overstate- 
ment on  the  other,  to  give  effect  to  their  humour, 
are  Yankee  to  the  life.  And  with  it  all  there  is  the 
unmistakable  moral  purpose,  neither  thrust  pug- 
naciously forward  nor  allowed  to  lapse  into  obliv- 


THE  NEW  RADICALISM  347 

ion,  but  as  constant  in  the  poet's  "  Biglow  Papers," 
"  Sir  Launfal,"  and  the  "  Commemoration  Ode," 
as  it  had  ever  been  in  his  father's  pulpit.  This  is 
not  for  a  moment  to  imply  that  any  element  of  the 
mere  ^  tract '  is  permitted  to  obtrude  itself.  The 
ethical  import  of  Lowell's  poetry  is  simply  the  nat- 
ural expression  of  his  convictions.  He  was,  as  Mr. 
Watts-Dunton  has  finely  said, "  in  courage,  in  truth- 
fulness, in  everything,  the  type  of  the  Puritan  idea 
in  its  most  bracing  expression."  His  brother  poet, 
Whittier,  voiced  the  same  thought  in  calling  him  — 

.  .  .    the  New  World's  child 
Who  in  the  language  of  their  farm-fields  spoke 
The  wit  and  wisdom  of  New  England  folk, 
Shaming  a  monstrous  wrong.^ 

This  positive  note  may  sometimes  escape  the  reader's 
first  glance,  in  view  of  Lowell's  capacity  for  giving 
a  humourous  turn  to  the  most  sacred  themes.  But 
the  negative  suggestion  of  — 

John  P. 
Robinson  he 
Sez  they  did  n't  know  everythin*  down  in  Judee, 

is  apparent  rather  than  real.  In  fact  it  is  a  whimsi- 
cal echo  of  Christ's  own  frequent  warning  lest  the 
forms  of  one  age  should  fetter  the  freedom  of  the 
Spirit  in  another.  So  Hosea  Biglow's  sapient  — 

An*  you  've  gut  to  git  up  airly 
Ef  you  want  to  take  in  God,— 

*  J.  G.  Whittier,  James  Russell  Lowell. 


348  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

is  as  sound  in  its  religious  and  ethical  content  as  it 
is  racy  of  the  soil/ 

The  secret  of  the  matter  was  suggested  by  Lowell 
himself  when  he  wrote,  after  a  reading  of  the  late 
Sir  Leslie  Stephen's  "English  Thought  in  the 
Eighteenth  Century/' — 

"  I  am  very  much  in  the  state  of  mind  of  the  Bretons 
who  revolted  against  the  revolutionary  government, 
and  wrote  upon  their  banners,  ^  Give  us  back  our 
God.'  I  suppose  I  am  an  intuitionalist,  and  there 
I  mean  to  stick.  I  accept  the  challenge  of  common 
sense  and  claim  to  have  another  faculty,  as  I  should 
insist  that  a  peony  was  red  though  twenty  colour- 
blind men  denied  it."  ^ 

1  am  not  concerned  here  to  defend  the  soundness 
of  Lowell's  apologetic  method.  Their  philosophical 
validity  apart,  however,  his  words  bear  significant 
testimony  to  the  value  of  faith  for  the  sort  of  work 
which  he  had  set  himself  to  do ;  and  in  this  respect 
he  may  without  violence  be  regarded  as  represent- 
ative of  the  whole  group  of  American  essayists  and 
poets  who  have  just  passed  in  review. 

'  Mr.  Andrew  Lang  expressed  this  feeling  in  his  article  in  Tlie 
Sign  of  the  Ship  soon  after  Lowell's  death.  "  Mr.  Lowell's  religious 
faith  (if  one  may  mention  such  matters)  had  a  solidity  and  fervour 
which  surprised  some,  and  might  well  convert  others  of  a  wavering 
temper  "  (Longman's  Magazine,  vol.  xviii,  p.  666). 

2  Cf .  article  on  "  The  Outgrown  Agnosticism,"  in  Boston  Tran- 
script of  Feb.  26,  1904. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE    GREAT   TWIN   BRETHREN:    TENNYSON   AND 
BROWNING 

*^  Death,  death !  It  is  this  harping  on  death  I  de- 
spise so  much.  .  .  .  This  idle  and  often  cowardly 
as  well  as  ignorant  harping !  Why  should  we  not 
change  like  everything  else  ?  In  fiction,  in  poetry, 
in  so  much  of  both  French  as  well  as  English, 
and,  I  am  told,  in  American  art  and  literature,  the 
shadow  of  death  —  call  it  what  you  will,  despair, 
negation,  indifference  —  is  upon  us.  But  what 
fools  who  talk  thus  !  .  .  .  Without  death,  which  is 
our  crape-like,  church-yardy  word  for  change,  for 
growth,  there  could  be  no  prolongation  of  that 
which  we  call  life."  ^ 

Mr.  William  Sharp  records  the  words  as  uttered 
by  Browning  in  his  presence.  They  vouch  for  them- 
selves not  less  by  their  brusqueness,  involution,  and 
demand  upon  the  reader's  breath  for  transport 
through  the  parentheses,  than  by  their  wholesome 
tone  and  savour  of  good  physical  and  spiritual  di- 
gestion. It  was  the  Browning  of  the  familiar  por- 
traits who  uttered  them,  though  they  have  a  certain 
verve  and  sparkle  which  the  composed,  eupeptic  face 
scarcely  promises.  I  have  set  them  at  the  head  of 

1  William  Sharp,  Life  of  Brovmingy  pp.  195-196. 


350  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

this  chapter  to  justify  its  title ;  for  their  sentiment 
is  no  less  characteristic  of  Tennyson  than  of  their 
author.  He  would  not,  to  be  sure,  have  chosen  to 
phrase  his  feeling  in  precisely  this  form,  though  his 
prose  could  at  times  be  as  rugged  as  Browning's; 
indeed,  he  seems  to  have  cultivated  in  conversation 
a  little  of  the  style  which  his  brother-poet  so  often 
overdid  in  verse. 

In  an  earlier  chapter  I  have  marked  the  tendency 
of  critics  to  contrast  great  contemporary  names  in 
literature,  as  though  Dickens  must  needs  be  meas- 
ured in  terms  of  Thackeray,  or  a  common  denomina- 
tor be  determined  for  Emily  Bronte  and  George 
Eliot.  Criticism  of  this  order  is  sure  to  become  ped- 
dling and  ungenerous.  It  is  a  commonplace  that  one 
star  differeth  from  another  star  in  glory,  but  the  task 
of  the  intelligent  observer  is  a  far  larger  one  than 
the  mere  determination  of  their  magnitudes ;  indeed, 
when  this  classification  is  complete,  the  scientific 
student  will  be  the  first  to  remember  that  these  ap- 
parent magnitudes  are  matters  of  relative  distance 
as  truly  as  of  size;  that  there  is  a  glory  of  constel- 
lation as  well  as  of  star ;  and  that  one  of  the  most 
fascinating  of  celestial  phenomena  consists  in  the 
great  binary  stars  where  two  suns  revolve  about  a 
common  centre,  each  supplementing  the  mass  and 
the  light  of  its  fellow. 

This  frequent  mistake  of  criticism  is,  however,  but 
a  tribute  to  the  extraordinary  abundance  of  its  ma- 
terial during  the  mid-Victorian  years.  It  is  only  as 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  351 

.we  draw  away  from  the  period  that  the  vision  of  its 
wealth  grows  clear.  To  have  had  at  once  two  such 
novelists  as  Dickens  and  Thackeray,  two  such 
preachers  as  Carlyle  and  Ruskin,  and  two  such  poets 
as  Tennyson  and  Browning,  was  enough  to  tempt 
the  critical  faculty  of  any  age  into  arrogance  and 
self-sufficiency.  Small  wonder  that  little  men  have 
contended  over  questions  of  their  relative  prece- 
dence. This  is  the  rule  while  the  contemporary  pro- 
cession files  by;  later  on,  time  offers  us  an  horizon 
where  we  discover  that  there  is  not  only  room  but 
need  for  such  large  figures  side  by  side. 

To  ask  which  is  the  greater  of  these  two  poets  is 
like  inquiring  into  the  relative  importance  of  Spring 
and  Autumn.  Indeed,  I  venture  to  go  further  and 
assert  that  their  relation  to  each  other  and  their 
value  to  life  are  not  unlike  the  relation  and  value  of 
Spring  and  Autumn.  Spring  stirs  the  blood,  while 
Autumn  grips  the  heart.  To  the  question  whether 
May's  half-ecstatic  ebullience  is  better  than  Octo- 
ber with  its  crisp  air,  ripe  fruit,  and  undertone  of 
pathos,  what  answer  is  to  be  returned  except  "  De 
gustibus  non  .  .  .  "?  The  suffrage  of  the  major- 
ity of  poets  will  perhaps  be  given  to  May ;  but  Oc- 
tober has  its  following  of  devotees  whom  it  haunts 
not  so  much  with  ecstasy  as  with  peace. 

Browning  was  one  of  those  poets  in  whom,  to  use 
his  own  fine  phrase,  "God  renews  His  ancient  rap- 
ture," the  rapture  of  springtime's  life.  Tennyson 
was  as  truly  a  poet  of  life,  but  it  was  life  face  to 


352  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

face  with  its  great  climacteric  mysteries  of  change. 
He  was  very  conscious  that  — 

God  fulfils  Himself  in  many  ways 
Lest  one  good  custom  should  corrupt  the  world ; 

and  he  knew,  none  better,  that  a  multitude  of  these 
ways  are  past  our  finding  out.  Both  poets  held  one 
course  through  life,  and  spoke  one  truth,  though 
in  widely  different  accents ;  both  were  keenly  alive 
to  the  trend  of  contemporary  philosophic  thought, 
and  were  at  once  inspired  and  puzzled  by  the  enor- 
mous strides  of  scientific  discovery ;  both  knew  by 
instinct  and  experience  the  power  and  prevalence 
of  religious  doubt ;  both  were  heirs  to  great  relig- 
ious traditions  and  convictions.  Each  acknowledged 
the  necessity  of  recasting  the  traditions;  neither 
could  rid  himself  of  the  convictions.  These  were 
recognized  to  have  grown  up  out  of  experience ;  to 
be  the  products  of  a  true  evolutionary  process ;  to 
belong  to  life ;  and  therefore  to  be  worth  a  man's 
reverent  and  scientific  regard. 

It  has  become  the  fashion  to  say  that  Browning's 
approach  to  his  art  was  that  of  a  great  harmonist ; 
Tennyson's,  that  of  an  equally  great  melodist.  The 
epigram  does  somewhat  scant  justice  to  Tennyson, 
while  it  rather  over-praises  Browning.  Tennyson 
had  a  respect  for  the  medium  in  which  he  wrought 
amounting  almost  to  reverence.  He  rarely  cared  to 
ply  his  ingenuity  merely  for  the  sake  of  seeing  what 
he  could  do.  Large  as  his  facility  and  his  power  of 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  353 

condensation  were,  he  preferred  to  exercise  himself 
in  great  rather  than  in  little  matters  of  form.  It 
was  better  to  master  blank  verse  until,  with  equal 
fitness  of  sound  to  sense,  it  could  tell  the  heroic 
storj  of  Arthur's  Passing  or  depict  Enoch  Arden's 
boyish  play  with  Philip  and  Annie,  than  it  was  to 
invent  a  new  metre.  Hence,  in  the  midst  of  abun- 
dant variety,  there  is  a  notable  uniformity  of  excel- 
lence. Not  only  was  he  great  as  a  lyric  and  elegiac 
poet,  but  the  popularity  of  the  "  Idylls "  has  a 
deeper  and  sounder  basis  than  the  romantic  story 
or  the  half-hidden  allegory  can  supply.  Although 
they  are  something  too  fragmentary  and  disjointed 
to  form  a  true  epic,  the  epic  note  is  sounded  with 
entire  clearness  and  an  inevitable  appeal,  which  is 
all  the  more  compelling  because  Tennyson  had  now 
wrought  his  blank  verse  into  an  instrument  perhaps 
the  most  nearly  perfect  for  epic  purposes  of  any 
metre  since  the  hexameters  of  Virgnl. 

While  Tennyson  was  thus  exercising  a  mastery 
over  his  art  as  legitimate  as  it  was  unquestioned, 
Browning  had  become  its  tyrant.  No  doubt  exists 
as  to  his  lordship  —  no  more  doubt  than  attaches 
to  the  vast  wealth  of  his  intellectual  and  spiritual 
resources.  The  difficulty  lies  in  the  fact  that  he  could 
not  bring  himself  to  treat  the  English  language  and 
the  poetic  forms  in  which  he  proposed  to  express 
his  thought  with  a  decent  respect.  Much  can  be 
forgiven  to  creative  genius  conscious  of  a  message 
and  impatient  for  its  utterance.  It  is  not  only  the 


354  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

privilege,  it  is  doubtless  sometimes  the  duty,  of  such 
a  man  to  drive  his  coach  and  four  through  ham- 
pering conventions ;  but  if  he  be  an  artist,  he  must 
respect  his  art  on  the  one  hand  and  his  public  on 
the  other.  Browning  seems  to  have  done  neither. 
A  supreme  master  of  English,  he  appears  never  to 
have  felt  the  sacred  character  of  his  servant. 

Drop  heart's  blood  where  life's  wheels  grate  dry, 

he  says  in  '^  Dis  Aliter  Visum."  The  great  symbols 
of  speech — and  no  language  can  be  properly  used 
until  its  essentially  symbolic  character  is  under- 
stood —  have  been  fashioned  by  just  this  method. 
They  represent  far  more  than  ingenious  attempts  at 
definition.  Generations  of  experience  comprising 
thought,  prayer,  and  tears  are  sometimes  summed 
up  in  common  words,  and  our  speech  gains  signifi- 
cance and  facility  from  the  heart's  blood  that  has 
been  mingled  with  it. 

Tennyson  wrought  very  reverently,  if  sometimes 
a  little  too  curiously,  with  language ;  Browning  too 
often  treated  it  like  a  mighty  slave  whose  duties 
ranged  from  the  making  of  great  music  to  the  rat- 
tling of  pots  and  pans,  but  whose  rights  were  an 
altogether  negligible  quantity.  There  was  something 
almost  literally  Philistine  in  the  perversity  with 
which  he  loved,  having  duly  blinded  his  Samson, 
to  set  him  now  to  grinding  verse  which  proved  to 
be  mere  bad  prose,  and  again  to  the  yet  more  pain- 
ful task  of  making  Gargantuan  sport.  The  thing  is 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  356 

never  commonplace ;  Browning  does  not  deny  him- 
self ;  but  the  pity  remains  that  he  should  descend  to 
such  un worthiness,  even  though  able  to  illuminate 
it  with  genius. 

What  other  poet  would  have  dared  to  write  the 
following  passage  as  rhymed  verse  ? 

"  'T  was  obviously  as  well  to  take  the  popular 
story  —  understanding  how  the  ineptitudes  of  the 
time,  and  the  penman's  prejudice,  expanding  fact 
into  fable  fit  for  the  clime,  had,  by  slow  and  sure 
degrees,  translated  it  into  this  myth,  this  Indivi- 
duum."  ' 

It  is  a  great  poem  —  "  The  Soliloquy  of  the  Span- 
ish Cloister  "  —  which  begins,  — 

Gr-r-r  —  there  go,  my  heart's  abhorrence ! 
Water  your  damned  flower-pots,  do ! 

In  some  editions  the  opposite  page  contains  a  stanza 
originally  entitled  "Beer,"  which  ends  with  the 
lines :  — 

He  says  that  at  Greenwich  they  point  the  beholder 
To  Nelson's  coat,  still  with  tar  on  the  shoulder  : 
For  he  used  to  lean  with  one  shoulder  digging, 
Jigging,  as  it  were,  and  zig-zag-zigging 
Up  against  the  mizzen-rigging. 

I  do  not  forget  Tennyson's  occasional  lapses  from 

the  plane  of  dignity  and  power.  "  0  darling  room  " 

is  secure  of  a  long  and  banal  life ;  while  the  stanza 

in  the  second  "  Locksley  Hall,"  beginning,  — 

Poor  old  Heraldry,  poor  old  History,  poor  old  Poetry, 

>  Christmas  Eve. 


356  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

has  more  than  a  touch  of  the  feebleness  of  age.  Yet 
even  in  these  there  is  a  grace  of  sound  which  serves 
too  vrell  to  keep  in  mind  the  meagreness  of  sense. 
He  was  incapable  of  thumping  cacophonic  tom-toms 
for  mere  exercise. 

Browning  could  occasionally  do  this;  or,  to  use  a 
worthier  figure,  he  permitted  himself  sometimes  to 
write  poetry  as  other  men  lay  brick  or  saw  wood.  It 
has  been  my  privilege  to  know  two  men  of  light  and 
leading  who  were  voluminous  writers  upon  great, 
though  somewhat  abstruse,  themes.  Both  were  es- 
teemed as  scholars  and  teachers.  Both  were  gener- 
ally voted  by  discerning  pupils  to  be  hopelessly  un- 
readable authors.  The  would-be  reader  caught  a 
glimpse  between  the  lines  of  an  industrious  hand 
beginning  its  daily  task  at  a  certain  hour,  pursuing 
it  through  a  stated  period,  and  covering  its  allotted 
pages.  These  men  wrote  a  volume  with  ease  while 
others  sweated  over  a  chapter  —  and  the  burden 
of  unprofitable  books  was  by  so  much  increased. 
Browning's  work  sometimes  reflects  this  method  — 
but  with  an  unhappy  difference.  The  mere  son  of 
literary  toil,  who  puts  his  thought  of  the  day  into 
his  manuscript  because  the  hour  for  writing  it  has 
come,  is  generally  a  negligible  though  an  irritating 
factor  in  the  world  of  letters.  Browning,  even  at 
his  worst,  will  not  be  thus  dismissed.  His  genius  is 
so  masterful  in  general  that,  even  when  he  is  unin- 
telligible, —  not  by  reason  of  profundity  of  thought 
but  through  sheer  refusal  to  take  pains  enough  to 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  357 

make  himself  understood,  or  through  a  cloudiness 
in  the  thought  itself,  which  time,  had  he  been  pa- 
tient, might  have  cleared  up,  —  we  are  teased  with 
the  suspicion  that  great  treasure  may  lurk  in  the 
rubbish  heap.  Sometimes  it  is  found  there — and 
we  are  the  less  able  to  neglect  the  next  tangle  of 
parentheses.  Sometimes  all  the  wealth  we  discover 
has  evidently  been  brought  in  from  without  —  the 
votive  offering  of  some  Browning  Society.  No  great 
English  poet  has  ever  suffered  or  deserved  so  much 
at  the  hands  of  commentators;  none  has  ever  shown 
Browning's  capacity  for  sweet  revenge  by  inocu- 
lating them  with  some  of  his  own  worst  faults ;  nor 
can  any  rival  dispute  with  him  the  distinction  of 
having  been  seriously  translated  into  his  native 
tongue.  Mr.  David  Duff  has  recently  turned  "  Sor- 
dello  "  into  English,  and  published  his  translation 
in  an  attractive  form.  Further  comment  upon 
Browning's  alleged  obscurity  is  needless,  beyond 
the  statement  that  for  the  average  reader  of  "  Sor- 
dello  "  such  a  volume  will  be  no  less  necessary  a 
companion  than  is  a  glossary  of  terms  to  the  un- 
derstanding of  the  "  Canterbury  Tales."  No  Mrs. 
Carlyle  of  the  future  can  read  the  poem  without 
discovering  whether  Sordello  was  a  man,  a  city,  or 
a  book  ;  nor  need  any  convalescent  Douglas  Jerrold 
be  seized  with  apprehensions  of  idiocy  because  its 
opening  sentences  refuse  to  yield  a  rational  idea. 

It  would  be  unfair  to  judge  Browning  by  "  Sor- 
dello " ;  but  it  is  necessary  to  put  the  poem  in  thq 


358  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

forefront  of  his  works  before  we  can  adequately 
realize  the  literary  anomaly  presented  by  its  au- 
thor's style.  "Sordello"  is  a  marvel,  and  the  better 
it  is  known  the  more  the  wonder  grows.  Much  is 
to  be  said  for  Mr.  Sharp's  claim  that  its  obscurity 
is  due  to  a  "warped  anxiety  for  irreducible  con- 
cision." ^  Concise  Browning  often  is,  to  the  lowest 
terms ;  and  he  is  no  less  often  as  diffuse  as  a  wilder- 
ness of  disjointed  parentheses  can  make  him.  But 
under  no  conceivable  circumstances  could  "Bor- 
dello "  have  been  made  an  ^  easy '  poem. 

"  Thoughts  may  he 
Over  poetical  for  poetry," 

says  Naddo  to  Sordello  in  Book  III,  and  in  his 
youthful  treatment  of  the  soul's  development 
Browning  illustrates  his  own  words.  In  the  "Pre- 
lude" Wordsworth  essayed  a  cognate  task;  and 
by  common  consent  wrote  the  least  readable  of 
his  longer  poems.  He  illustrated  the  growth  of  a 
poet's  mind ;  Browning,  the  rebirth  of  a  poet's 
soul.  Without  inquiring  too  curiously  into  their 
several  definitions  of  '  mind '  and  ^  soul,'  readers  of 
the  two  poems  will  feel  instinctively  the  difference 
between  Wordsworth's  philosophic  detachment  and 
Browning's  identification  of  Sordello's  self  with 
the  world  of  nature  and  of  man  through  which  he 
not  only  moves  but  of  which  he  becomes  a  part.^ 

^  William  Sharp,  Life  of  Browning,  p.  106. 

2  I  would  not  imply,  however,  that  Wordsworth  was  a  stranger 
to  the  mystic's  rapture.   In  a  letter  included  in  Tennyson's  Life 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  359 

The  closing  sentences  of  the  Dedication  of  "  Sor- 
dello"  offer  us  a  key  to  the  poet's  work  as  a 
whole. 

"  The  historical  decoration  was  purposely  of  no 
more  importance  than  a  background  requires;  and 
my  stress  lay  on  the  incidents  in  the  development 
of  a  soul;  little  else  is  worth  study.  I,  at  least, 
always  thought  so;  you,  with  many  known  and 
unknown  to  me,  think  so;  others  may  one  day 
think  so. 


>>  1 


The  path  along  which  we  follow  Sordello  from 
careless  boyhood,  through  selfishly  ambitious  youth, 
to  the  premature  age  in  which  he  realizes  the 
bitter  lot  of  the  people  about  him  and  the  petty 
evanescence  of  all  accomplishment  or  fame  which 
does  not  take  account  of  their  need  and  represent 
exertion  in  their  service,  may  be  hard  to  follow, 
but  its  direction  and  its  goal  are  sure.  A  man 
never  fulfils  himself  until  he  realizes  that  the 
greatest  thing  in  the  world  is  its  life,  as  evidenced 
first  in  his  own  soul  and  then  in  the  souls  of 
men  about  him,  with  whom  he  must  live  service- 
ably. 

Prof.  Tyndall  says  that  Wordsworth,  walking  one  evening  with  a 
friend,  seized  a  gate  which  they  were  approaching,  and  remarked 
to  his  companion  as  he  held  it  firmly,  "  My  dear  sir,  to  assure  my- 
self of  the  existence  of  my  own  body,  I  am  sometimes  obliged  to 
grasp  an  object  like  this  and  shake  it "  (^Alfredf  Lord  Tennyson^ 
vol.  ii,  p.  474). 

^  It  should  be  remembered  that  this  is  not  the  utterance  of 
Browning's  youth,  but  of  his  mature  conviction.  The  Dedication 
was  not  written  until  1860. 


360  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Tennyson  was  always  exclaiming  against  the  cant 
phrase  "  Art  for  Art's  sake  "  and  amended  it  to  "  Art 
for  Art  —  and  Man's  sake."  ^  'Browning  in  "  Bor- 
dello "  takes  up  his  dark  though  mighty  parable  ex- 
actly to  the  same  effect.  Here  both  were  at  one  with 
the  deeper  message  of  the  Christian  faith.  Both 
were  essentially  religious  men  from  youth  to  age. 
Neither  can  be  accounted  for  in  respect  of  heredity 
except  by  giving  large  place  to  the  influence  of  family 
religion.  Tennyson's  father  was  a  clergyman  as  well 
as  a  poet ;  and  through  all  the  son's  life  and  work 
there  runs  a  certain  Church  of  England  strain.  One 
hesitates  to  write  the  words  lest  they  should  seem  to 
connote  sectarianism  with  its  attendant  narrowness. 
Tennyson  was  a  very  intense  Englishman  and,  in 
my  own  view,  the  better  poet  for  it.  He  was  not 
free  from  the  prejudices  of  the  class  into  which  birth 
introduced  him  ;  his  occasional  references  to  France 
and  the  French  are  humourously  insular;  and  he 
looked  askance  at  Dissenters.  But  upon  the  whole 
he  kept  his  prejudices  for  private  conversation  and 
dedicated  his  verse  to  larger  uses.  Like  many  another 
of  her  greater  sons,  it  was  the  Church  as  an  element 
in  the  national  life,  bound  up  with  the  hearts  and 
homes  of  long  generations,  symbolizing  man's  aspira- 
tion after  forgiveness,  vision,  and  immortality,  that 
he  loved.  Through  these  avenues  rather  than  by 
the  authority  of  article  or  creed,  her  deeper  influ- 
ences reached  him ;  and  in  these  aspects  he  presented 

*  Alfred,  Lord  Tennyson,  vol.  ii,  p.  92. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  361 

her  to  the  world.  There  is  a  certain  elegance  —  to 
use  a  dubious  word  —  about  Tennyson's  poetry  ;  a 
fineness  of  grain,  a  purity  alike  of  thought  and  of 
expression,  an  essential  high-mindedness  that  avoids 
mere  austerity  without  sacrifice  of  simplicity,  which 
the  world  has  come  to  associate  with  a  type  of  man 
bred  in  an  English  parsonage-house  and  trained  at 
an  English  university  under  the  old  classical  tradi- 
tions. Such  breeding,  when  permitted  to  have  its  way 
with  great  natural  gifts,  inevitably  begets  a  distinc- 
tion far  higher  and  more  comprehensive  than  mere 
manner.  It  ministers  to  the  development  of  an  art 
which  by  its  grace,  wholesomeness,  and  humanity, 
is  secure  of  long  life. 

At  the  risk  of  making  a  distinction  which  to  some 
will  seem  invidious,  I  should  say  that  in  very  much 
the  same  degree  Browning  represents  the  non-con- 
forming element  in  English  life  and  verse.  The 
analogy  must  not  be  pressed  too  far;  but  even  a 
casual  reader  will  recall  abundant  illustrations  of 
what  I  mean.  In  the  best  sense  Browning  was  a 
man  of  the  world,  conventional,  with  the  common 
serviceable  conventionality  of  a  gentleman  who  meets 
other  men  upon  their  own  plane,  respecting  their 
rights  as  he  would  have  his  own  respected ;  yet  this 
very  thing  he  carried  to  the  point  of  unconvention- 
ality.  He  was  as  cosmopolitan  as  Tennyson  was 
national.  No  great  English  poet  has  been  so  little 
British.  This  is  not  to  say  that  he  was  unpatriotic  ; 
—  "  Home  Thoughts  from  Abroad,"  "  0  to  be  in 


362  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

England,"  and  perhaps  even  more  the  satisfaction 
which  he  seems  to  have  found  in  a  drama  of  English 
History  like  "  Strafford/'  or  of  English  life  like  "  A 
Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon/'  would  refute  that  charge ; 
—  but  none  the  less  Italy  rather  than  England  seems 
to  be  his  home  ;  and  it  is  the  Italy,  not  merely  of 
the  Italians,  but  of  the  expatriates  of  every  clime 
and  tongue,  —  the  Italy  where  men  touch  the  life 
of  all  nations  through  their  representatives.  Shake- 
speare, too,  loved  Venice  and  Verona ;  but  as  an 
Englishman  gifted  with  transcendent  insight  and 
sympathies  might  love  them  —  from  London  or 
Warwickshire.  Universal  as  Shakespeare's  genius 
was,  there  was  an  honest  English  flavour  of  common 
sense  about  its  expression.  If  he  went  abroad  for  a 
theme  it  was  that  he  might  bring  it  home  and  illus- 
trate it  in  the  light  he  knew  the  best.  Byron  also 
gloried  in  what  he  supposed  to  be  his  cosmopolitan 
divorce  from  all  things  insular  ;  yet  he  was  haunted 
to  the  last  by  Mrs.  Grundy.  Britain,  and  what  his 
jaundiced  eyes  mistook  for  British  respectability, 
were  necessary  to  him  in  order  that  they  might  be 
perpetually  mocked  or  defied ;  without  their  stimu- 
lus half  his  inspiration  must  have  fled.  Such  sopho- 
moric  perversity  was  of  course  impossible  to  Brown- 
ing. The  lines  to  Edward  FitzGerald  remain  to  show 
us  how  cruel  his  wrath  could  be;  but  his  was  quite 
too  broad  and  sane  a  nature  to  be  betrayed  into 
any  echo  of  Cain's  dyspepsia  or  Manfred's  mock- 
heroics. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  363 

His  treatment  of  men  and  things  was  essentially 
reverent,  yet  he  loved  a  manner  of  approach  which 
the  habitually  conforming  mind  found  it  hard  to 
understand.  "  Fifine  at  the  Fair "  may  illustrate 
what  I  mean.  The  subject,  like  the  scene,  is  French 
rather  than  English.  A  man,  accompanied  by  his 
wife  whom  he  respects  as  well  as  loves,  sees  in  a 
travelling  show  a  buxom  performer  whose  physical 
charms  appeal  to  him  no  less  than  the  curious  prob- 
lem presented  by  her  occupation.  It  is  from  the 
standpoint  of  this  struggle  between  a  permanent 
attachment  and  a  passing  fancy,  that  the  poet  dis- 
cusses the  question  of  man's  relation  to  the  tem- 
poral and  the  eternal.  The  problem  is  essentially 
ethical  and  religious ;  the  method  of  approach  is 
unusual  enough  to  have  given  Mrs.  Grundy  some 
pain,  had  not  the  poem  itself  been  so  unconscion- 
ably difficult  as  to  keep  her  from  acquaintance  with 
more  than  its  title. 

It  is  this  "  clashing  complexity  of  human  life," 
involving  problems  which  no  mere  conventional 
explanations  suffice  to  solve,  that  brings  Browning 
to  the  threshold  of  rehgion ;  and  his  exhortation  in 
the  Prologue  to  "  Pacchiarotto," — 

Hold  on,  hope  hard  in  the  subtle  thing 
That 's  spirit,  — 

goes  far  to  explain  not  merely  where  he  found  his 
poetic  material  and  inspiration,  but  how,  in  spite  of 
defects  which  must  have  swamped  a  lesser  poet, 


364  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

he  has  managed  to  win  an  ever-increasing  number 
of  readers  and  disciples.  The  facts  that  at  the  be- 
ginning of  his  career  Browning  owed  much  to  the 
favourable  criticism  of  Mr.  W.  J.  Fox,  a  Unitarian 
minister  of  high  literary  gifts,  that  later  on  in  life 
he  worshipped  statedly  in  a  Congregational  Chapel, 
and  that  his  ^  orthodoxy '  often  brought  him  into 
conflict  with  'rationalistic'  friends,  are  perhaps 
worth  noting  in  this  connection,  although  they  are 
not  of  the  first  importance.^ 

No  adequate  estimate  can  be  made  of  the  material 
which  these  two  poets  wrought  into  verse,  without 
taking  serious  account  of  the  Bible.  Professor  van 
Dyke,  who  has  published  a  list  of  over  four  hundred 
passages  in  which  Tennyson  reflects  the  thought  or 
echoes  the  language  of  Scripture  texts,  remarks  upon 
the  bond  of  sympathy  which  the  Bible  forms  be- 
tween the  most  cultivated  and  the  simplest  people.^ 
Tennyson's  saturation  with  the  thought  of  the  Bible 
and  his  intimacy  with  its  literary  style  go  far  to 
account  for  his  immediate  appeal  to  multitudes  of 
readers.  The  problems  of  Scripture  are  universal, 
and  its  solutions,  whether  men  hear  or  forbear,  of 
universal  interest.    In  both  English  and  German  it 

*  The  late  Mr.  Moncure  Conway  used  to  say  that  Browning 
once  joined  debate  with  an  itinerant  atheist  preacher  whom  on  one 
of  his  walks  he  found  haranguing  a  crowd,  and  vehemently  upheld 
the  Faith.  It  was  not  unlike  him.  Cf.  Mrs.  Sutherland  Orr's  Life 
and  Letters,  vol.  ii,  pp.  630-632. 

2  The  Poetry  of  Tennyson^  tenth  ed.,  p.  247.  See  the  whole  chap- 
ter, pp,  245-279.  » 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  365 

has  exercised  a  profoundly  formative  influence  upon 
the  national  tongue.  Into  its  language  has  been 
poured  so  much  of  man's  deepest  f  eeHng  and  noblest 
aspiration  as  to  make  it  symbolic  in  very  high  de- 
gree ;  and,  as  has  been  already  noted,  the  worth  of 
language  is  largely  determined  by  its  symbolic  power. 
Hence  poets  and  orators,  however  little  concerned 
they  may  be  with  religion,  have  natural  recourse  to 
Scripture  language  in  their  endeavour  to  touch  the 
heart  or  reflect  the  experience  of  men. 

Tennyson  and  Browning,  however,  not  only  had 
this  natural  tendency  to  use  the  speech  and  figures 
of  the  Bible  :  they  were  both  intensely  interested 
in  the  problems  of  ethics  and  religion  with  which 
the  Bible  deals;  and  however  ^orthodox'  or  ^het- 
erodox' they  may  have  thought  themselves,  the 
Scriptural  approach  to  these  questions  seemed  to 
them  to  be  of  large  moment.  Into  "  Ferishtah's 
Fancies  "  Browning  characteristically  enough  intro- 
duced some  Hebrew  quotations  which,  as  he  wrote 
to  a  friend,  "  are  put  in  for  a  purpose,  as  a  direct  ac- 
knowledgement that  certain  doctrines  may  be  found 
in  the  Old  Book,  which  the  concocters  of  Modern 
Schemes  of  Morality  put  forth  as  discoveries  of  their 
own."^ 

Considerable  space  might  easily  be  given  to  this 
common  debt  which  both  poets  acknowledge.  Thus 
in  "  Locksley  Hall,  Sixty  Years  After  "  Tennyson 
quotes,  — 

*  Sharp,  Life  of  Browning,  p.  182. 


366  ENGLISH  LITERATUREi 

Love  your  enemy,  bless  your  haters,  said  the  Greatest  of  the 
Great ;  ^ 

while  in  "  A  Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon  "  Browning 
sums  up  the  play,  and  voices  a  similar  Scriptural 
command  in  Thorold  Tresham's  dying  words,  — 

Vengeance  is  God's,  not  man's.     Remember  me ! 

Both  were  fascinated  by  the  story  of  Lazarus  risen 
from  the  dead,  and  both  have  enshrined  it  in  verse 
almost  as  haunting  and  as  sure  of  remembrance  as 
the  original  chapter  in  St.  John's  Gospel ;  Browning 
in  "  An  Epistle,"  and  Tennyson  in  Section  xxxi  of 
'^  In  Memoriam."  Browning,  too,  loved  to  echo  the 
old  prophetic  preaching  of  sin  and  the  need  for  re- 
pentance, touching  it  with  a  gleam  of  characteristic 
humour  often,  but  yet  content  to  leave  it  in  a  form 
that  would  bear  pulpit  utterance.  Such,  for  instance, 
is  the  first  section  of  "  Ben  Karshook's  Wisdom." 

"  Would  a  man  'scape  the  rod  ?  " 

Rabbi  Ben  Karshook  saith, 
"  See  that  he  turn  to  God 

The  day  before  his  death  !  " 

"  Ay,  could  a  man  inquire 

When  it  shall  come  !  "  I  say. 
The  Rabbi's  eye  shoots  fire  — 
"  Then  let  him  turn  to-day  !  " 

In  very  much  more  musical  as  well  as  tragic  verse 
Tennyson  adapts  the  language  of  Scripture  to  the 

^  In  less  tragic  form  the  same  lesson  is  inculcated  as  explicitly 
in  Sea  Breams, 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  367 

purpose  of  his  famous  sermon  in  "  Aylmer's  Field  " 
from  the  text,  "  Behold,  your  house  is  left  unto  you 
desolate."  The  poem  is  so  compact  of  Biblical  ref- 
erence, phrase,  and  feeling  as  to  make  illustration 
difficult  except  one  quote  the  whole.  It  would  admi- 
rably serve  the  purposes  of  a  college  examination  in 
ability  to  recognize  and  verify  allusions  to  Scripture. 
A  few  verses  must  suffice. 

Then  came  a  Lord  in  no  wise  like  to  BaaL 

The  babe  shall  lead  the  lion.  Surely  now 

The  wilderness  shall  blossom  as  the  rose. 

Crown  thyself,  worm,  and  worship  thine  own  lusts ! 

In  such  a  shape  dost  thou  behold  thy  God. 
Thou  wilt  not  gash  thy  flesh  for  him  ;  for  thine 
Fares  richly,  in  fine  linen,  not  a  hair 
Ruffled  upon  the  scarfskin,  even  while 
The  deathless  ruler  of  thy  dying  house 
Is  wounded  to  the  death  that  cannot  die  ; 
And  tho'  thou  numberest  with  the  followers 
Of  One  who  cried,  "  Leave  all  and  follow  me." 

Thee  shall  thy  brother  man,  the  Lord  from  Heaven 
Bom  of  a  village  girl,  carpenter's  son, 
Wonderful,  Prince  of  peace,  the  Mighty  God, 
Count  thee  more  base  idolater  of  the  two ; 
Crueller  :  as  not  passing  thi'o'  the  fire 
Bodies,  but  souls  —  thy  children's  —  thro'  the  smoke. 

Friends,  I  was  bid  to  speak  of  such  a  one 

By  those  who  most  have  cause  to  sorrow  for  her  — 

Fairer  than  Rachel  by  the  palmy  well. 

Fairer  than  Ruth  among  the  fields  of  com, 

Fair  as  the  Angel  that  said,  "  Hail !  "she  seem'd, 

Who  entering  filled  the  house  with  sudden  light. 


368  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Tennyson  was  little  disposed  to  choose  explicit 
Scripture  themes,  though  his  "Rizpah"  is  a  noble 
modern  paraphrase  of  a  Biblical  episode.  Browning, 
on  the  other  hand,  did  some  of  his  most  memorable 
work,  and  appeals  perhaps  to  his  largest  audience, 
in  three  great  poems  upon  Bible  characters, "  Saul," 
Lazarus  in  "  An  Epistle,"  and  St.  John  in  "  A 
Death  in  the  Desert." 

It  is  no  part  of  my  purpose,  however,  to  make 
overmuch  of  this  connection  between  Scripture 
themes  or  language  and  the  work  of  these  poets. 
The  connection  exists,  and  suggests  the  worth,  to 
a  poet's  manner  and  matter  both,  of  the  world's 
greatest  religious  Hterature,  to  say  nothing  of  the 
wider  public  assured  to  a  writer  who  will  express 
himself  with  skill  upon  great  themes  in  language 
dear  and  sacred  to  multitudes  of  thoughtful  people. 
The  contact  between  relio^ion  and  such  literature  as 
Browning  and  Tennyson  represent  becomes  at  once 
vital  and  essential  instead  of  formal  or  incidental, 
when  we  begin  to  consider  the  themes  to  which 
they  turned  and  the  spirit  in  which  they  approached 
them.  Both  were  philosophers;  which  is  simply 
another  way  of  saying  that  both  looked  out  open- 
eyed  upon  the  mysteries  of  experience  and  wel- 
comed a  challenge  to  their  investigation.  Both  were 
essentially  pure-minded  and  reverent  men.  This  is 
not  to  deny  in  them  the  presence  of  nature's  deeper 
physical  instincts  or  a  warmth  of  blood  which  often 
colours  their  verse.   There  was  a  rich  vein  of  the 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  369 

sensuous  in  both.  "Lucretius"  vouches  for  Ten- 
nyson here,  as  does  "  Fifine  "  for  Browning ;  and 
there  are  passages  in  the  latter' s  work  which  sug- 
gest his  capacity  as  a  painter  of  the  horrible  had  he 
chosen  to  follow  lower  instead  of  higher  instincts ; 
so  close  akin  are  the  sensuous  and  the  cruel.  Read- 
ers of  "  Sordello/'  for  instance,  will  remember  Sa- 
linguerra's  fight  with  mob  and  fire  at  the  gate  of 
Vicenza,  and  how  — 

The  blood  fries 
And  hisses  on  your  brass  gloves  as  they  tear 
Those  upturned  faces  choking  with  despair. 

This  is  perhaps  the  least  unquotable  of  three 
episodes  in  the  poem  which  for  me  are  among  the 
most  grisly  in  our  literature,  fit  to  set  beside  the 
murder  in  Le  Fanu's  "  Uncle  Silas,"  Poe's  "  Facts 
in  the  Case  of  M.  Valdemar,"  and  Kipling's  "  End 
of  the  Passage."  That  these  two  poets  should  have 
held  such  power  to  exalt  and  amplify  the  fleshly  in 
strict  control  is  a  tribute  at  once  to  their  individual 
characters  and  to  their  common  art.  It  was  possible 
to  them  because  of  their  intense  interest  in  life's 
greater  issues. 

I  do  not  propose  to  attempt  an  exposition  of  the 
religious  and  ethical  views  set  forth  in  their  works. 
I  desire,  rather,  roughly  to  appraise  the  value  of 
religion  to  them  as  poets.  Both,  as  I  have  indicated, 
were  deeply  occupied  with  problems  of  the  soul. 
Tennyson  won  a  great  public  by  his  essentially 
modern  treatment  of  death,  grief,  doubt,  and  in  ex- 


370  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

pugnable  hope  in  ''In  Memoriam";  but  it  was  a 
public  which  he  had  in  some  measure  prepared  to 
receive  his  message  by  such  earlier  work  as  "  The 
Palace  of  Art/'  "  St.  Simeon  Stylites,"  "  The  Two 
Voices/'  and  "  The  Vision  of  Sin."  These  four 
early  poems,  with  the  "  Ulysses,"  which  in  some 
respects  I  should  place  at  their  head,  form  an  abun- 
dant answer  to  the  critics  who  complain  of  Tenny- 
son's lack  of  substance  and  accuse  him  of  sacrificing 
matter  to  form.  If  there  are  greater  themes  than 
those  suggested  here,  I  do  not  know  what  they  can 
be.  "  Ulysses  "  may  fittingly  head  the  list,  because 
its  haunting  verse  not  only  depicts  shore,  sea,  night, 
and  stars  with  exquisite  beauty,  but  makes  of  the 
whole  a  setting  for  the  figure  of  a  symbolic  man. 
Ulysses  is  not  merely  the  dubious  hero  of  the 
Odyssey ;  he  is  far  more.  Schelling  somewhere  says 
that  "  the  Spirit  has  its  Iliad,  its  tale  of  struggle 
with  brutal  and  natural  forces,  and  then  its  Odyssey, 
when  out  of  its  painful  wanderings  it  returns  to 
the  Infinite."^  The  place  of  Ulysses  in  classical 
literature  is  comparable  to  that  of  Abraham  in  Holy 
Writ.  Each  represents  man  as  the  Pilgrim  of  the 
Universe.  Abraham  was  turned  out  of  doors  by  his 
vision  of  a  higher  faith,  and  went  forth,  "not 
knowing  whither  he  went "  ;  Ulysses,  in  Tennyson's 
poem,  feels  this  same  impulse  to  seek  a  larger 
world.  The  same  spirit  of  adventure  animates  both 

*  I  owe  this  quotation  to  Dr.  A.  M.  Fairbairn.     See  The  Place  of 
Christ  in  Modem  Theology^  p.  212. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  371 

heroes;  in  one  case  exalted  into  the  realm  of 
religion,  in  the  other  moving  upon  what  we  blindly 
call  a  more  ^material'  plane;  but  none  the  less 
bespeaking  the  existence  of  a  divine  image  or  like- 
ness in  man.  To  use  the  old  phrase,  man  "  cannot 
be  holden "  permanently  by  mere  circumstance. 
Ulysses  is  face  to  face  with  age ;  but  there  are  still 
so  many  seas  to  be  sailed,  so  many  lands  to  be 
visited,  so  much  to  do  and  bear  in  the  world,  that 
he  is  impatient  of  rest  and  security.  The  very  fact 
that  there  are  dangers  in  the  unknown  for  the  lover 
of  mere  life  to  fear,  adds  an  incentive  to  his  rest- 
lessness. Many  a  man  has  achieved  a  difficult  enter- 
prise from  a  haunting  fear  in  his  heart  lest  he  be 
afraid  to  undertake  it ;  he  has  attacked  it  to  justify 
himself  to  himself.  It  is  the  instinctive  self-asser- 
tion of  the  regal  element  in  human  will.  This  cry 
of  Ulysses,  — 

I  am  a  part  of  all  that  I  have  met,  — 

is  underrun  with  the  assurance  that  he  is,  after  all, 
the  regnant  part.  He  is  so  conscious  of  the  brevity 
of  life's  chance  as  to  lament  his  three  years'  rest  at 
home  :  — 

And  this  gray  spirit  yearning  in  desire 
To  follow  knowledge  like  a  sinking  star, 
Beyond  the  utmost  bound  of  human  thought. 

It  is  to  be  acknowledged  that  death  closes  all ; 
and  yet  —  and  yet,  there  is  something  in  Ulysses 
that  challenges  even  that  patent  fact :  — 


372  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

For  my  purpose  holds 
To  sail  beyond  the  sunset,  and  the  baths 
Of  all  the  western  stars,  until  I  die. 
It  may  be  that  the  gulfs  will  wash  us  down ; 
It  may  be  we  shall  touch  the  Happy  Isles, 
And  see  the  great  Achilles,  whom  we  knew. 
Tho'  much  is  taken,  much  abides  ;  and  tho* 
We  are  not  now  that  strength  which  in  old  days 
Moved  earth  and  heaven ;  that  which  we  are,  we  are : 
One  equal  temper  of  heroic  hearts, 
Made  weak  by  time  and  fate,  but  strong  in  will 
To  strive,  to  seek,  to  find,  and  not  to  yield. 

This,  early  in  life,  was  Tennyson's  statement  of 
a  fundamental  article  in  his  faith  which  goes  far 
to  account  for  the  wholesomeness  of  his  influence. 
As  a  boy  my  acquaintance  with  the  poem  began 
when  reading  the  late  Sir  Henry  M.  Stanley's 
address  to  his  men  as  they  set  out  upon  their  un- 
tried way  through  Africa.  The  adventure  was  a 
great  and  doubtful  one ;  and  inevitably  the  words 
of  a  courageous  leader,  dedicating  himself  as  well 
as  encouraging  his  followers,  took  on  something 
of  the  complexion  of  the  "  Ulysses."  The  incident 
suggests  the  universal  quality  in  Tennyson's  best 
work,  its  unfailing  soundness,  its  heartening  power, 
and  its  fundamental  kinship  with  religion.  Practi- 
cally all  that  he  wrote  from  the  day  of  "  Ulysses  " 
to  that  of  ^^De  Profundis  "  is  instinct  with  this  high 
notion  of  personality.  That  personality  is  a  mystery 
does  not  disturb  him ;  that  it  should  always  prove 
too  big  for  the  compass  of  our  definitions  rather  en- 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  373 

hances  its  dignity  and  worth.  The  fact  that  we  can- 
not altogether  comprehend  so  great  yet  intimate  a 
thing,  only  makes  it  better  worth  our  while  to  grasp 
at  least  the  outskirts  of  its  ways  and  learn  what  we 
may  of  its  capacities  and  powers.  As  a  philosophical 
riddle  the  question  of  free  will  may  remain  indefi- 
nitely beyond  us ;  as  a  fact  of  experience  we  are 
obliged  to  treat  man's  will  as  a  creative  power.  For 
the  purposes  of  our  life  together  we  must  suppose 
it  to  be  free,  at  least  within  large  limits.  To  Tenny- 
son it  seemed  reasonable  in  the  strictly  scientific 
sense  to  recognize  this  mastery  of  circumstance  as 
a  legitimate  attribute  of  a  man's  soul.  The  hypo- 
thesis which  best  fits  life  and  conduct  upon  the 
present  stage  of  existence  is  — 

This  main-miracle,  that  thou  art  thon, 
With  power  on  thine  own  act  and  on  the  world. 

This  is  no  less  the  burden  of  Christianity,  which 
never  makes  light  of  the  paradoxes  of  speculation 
or  the  puzzles  of  experience,  but  simply  asks  men 
to  use  the  powers  they  have  for  the  discipline  of 
their  instincts  and  passions  and  for  the  attainment 
of  the  highest  ends.  The  essence  of  Christ's  Gospel 
was  that  man  should  practically  recognize  and  ful- 
fil his  relationship  to  God,  and  his  power  over  a 
world  which  is  meant  to  become  a  kingdom  of 
God. 

The  early  poems  of  "The  Two  Voices"  and 
"St.  Simeon  Stylites  "  are  admirable  paraphrases 


374  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  modern  language  of  the  old  cry  of  St.  Paul  con- 
scious of  the  war  in  his  members.  "  The  Vision  of 
Sin  "  is  a  replica  of  the  Scriptural  "  mystery  of  in- 
iquity." "  Aylmer's  Field,"  "  Locksley  Hall,"  and 
"  Maud  "  all  remind  us  of  the  miserable  and  often 
suicidal  fraud  perpetrated  by  him  who  would  ap- 
praise his  own  life  or  that  of  another  in  terms  of 
material  possessions.  "The  Princess,"  though  in 
lighter  vein,  is  still  inspired  with  something  of  the 
same  thought  that  every  life,  without  distinction  of 
sex,  should  have  scope  for  growth  and  self-fulfil- 
ment; but  the  poet's  sound  English  sense  speaks 
throuofh  it  to  remind  his  readers  that  this  self-ful- 
filment  is  most  likely  to  develop  along  the  lines  of 
that  human  experience  which  has  become  a  second 
human  nature. 

"  In  Memoriam  "  is  like  a  magic  mirror  held  up 
to  the  heart  and  mind  of  its  century.  The  fact  that 
it  is  really  a  mass  of  related  fragments  may  possibly 
have  enhanced  rather  than  diminished  its  power  to 
reflect  the  broken  lights  which  fell  upon  it.  Those 
who  base  Tennyson's  popularity  upon  his  command 
of  a  mere  prettiness  of  phrase,  cannot,  it  seems  to 
me,  have  looked  beneath  the  surface  of  this  poem. 
Here  is  man  face  to  face  with  the  world-old  mystery 
of  death ;  and  with  the  no  less  compelling  mystery 
of  disappointed  hopes  and  shattered  plans,  since 
death  has  broken  in  violently  upon  a  life  of  promise 
instead  of  coming  in  the  course  of  nature  and  in 
fulness  of  time.  Moreover  the  integrity  of  such  life 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  375 

as  remains  is  doubly  threatened ;  first,  by  the  fact 
of  loss,  and  then  by  the  revolution  which  the  age 
has  wrought  upon  faith.  Elegy  which  sets  forth 
death's  sadness  and  sorrow's  poignancy  is  as  old  as 
poetry ;  but  it  remained  for  Tennyson  to  depict  the 
desolation  of  a  heart  not  only  bereaved  of  the  object 
of  its  love,  but  threatened  with  bereavement  of  all 
sources  of  its  hope.  No  poet  of  his  century  seemed 
to  have  so  keen  a  sense  for  the  inner  meanings  of 
its  mighty  scientific  and  critical  revolutions.  Ten- 
nyson makes  good  his  claim  here  to  a  place  among 
the  great  prophets  and  seers.  Before  the  "  Origin 
of  Species  "  had  made  men  conversant  with  ^natural 
selection '  and  the  '  survival  of  the  fittest,'  and  while 
the  idea  of  evolution  was  yet  general  and  undefined, 
he  seems  to  have  discerned  by  instinct  the  confu- 
sion which  impended  over  the  faith  of  his  genera- 
tion. Evolution  was  not  yet  the  name  to  conjure 
with  which  it  became  in  the  sixties  and  seventies ; 
but  the  shadow  of  its  coming  was  discernible  to 
Tennyson's  eye.  First  among  poets  he  saw  the 
place  which  biological  studies  were  to  claim  in  the 
thought  of  the  century  and  their  family  relation 
to  religion. 

"  In  comparing  him  with  Carlyle,"  says  Professor 
Tyndall,  "  I  notice  that  the  latter  drew  his  imagery, 
for  the  most  part,  from  what  we  call  inorganic  na- 
ture. Physics  and  chemistry  were  well  advanced 
when  Carlyle  wrote,  but  modern  researches  in  bi- 
ology had  scarcely  begun.    These  latter  fell  into 


376  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

your  father's  hands,  and  he  has  made  noble  use  of 
them  from  '  In  Memoriam '  onward."  * 

Moreover  the  note  of  faith  in  "  In  Memoriam"  is 
as  truly  modern  as  the  picture  of  its  doubt.  There 
is  no  argument  of  the  scholastic  sort.  The  problem 
is  approached  more  often  after  the  traditional  man- 
ner of  Cambridge  than  of  Oxford ;  the  poet  showing 
himself  to  be  of  closer  kin  to  the  Platonists  than  to 
Bishop  Butler.^ 

Both  Tennyson  and  Browning,  in  their  dealing 
with  religious  problems,  prefigure  what  is  best  and 
most  suggestive  in  modern  Pragmatism.  The  be- 
reaved man  finds  his  dearest  ties  broken,  his  hopes 
for  the  future  in  this  world  a  mass  of  fragments, 
and  his  faith  in  another  a  chaos  of  uncertainties. 
What  shall  he  do?  Whence  shall  he  seek  comfort? 
Nature,  viewed  with  the  partial  vision  of  the  new 
biology,  seems  "  to  shriek  against  his  creed."  Man, 
speaking  through  the  lips  of  M.  Comte  and  the 
Positivists,  would  mock  him  with  an  abstract  con- 
tinuance of  racial  life  wherein  are  to  be  found  no 
traces  of  that  personal  entity  which  was  his  friend. 
Blank  dogmatic  atheism  is  but  another  and,  if 
possible,  an  uglier  name  for  madness.  He  is  forced 
therefore  to  approach  the  problem  of  life's  recon- 

*  "  A  Glimpse  of  Farringford,"  by  John  Tyndall,  in  Alfred ^  Lord 
Tennyson,  vol.  ii,  p.  475. 

'  Those  familiar  with  the  Life  will  remember  Tennyson's  con- 
versation with  Mr.  Gladstone  upon  the  two  Universities,  vol.  ii, 
pp.  490-491. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  377 

struction  from  the  side  of  life's  needs.  In  homely 
phrase,  he  must  decide  whether  or  not  what  he  does 
know  is  to  be  worsted  and  put  to  confusion  by  what 
he  does  not  know.  Christianity  has  always  given  a 
simple  but  very  positive  and  cheerful  answer  to  this 
question.  Man  is  meant  to  dominate  the  world ;  to 
read  its  record,  to  possess  its  substance,  to  set  in 
order  its  confusions.  Tennyson  once  said  to  Tyn- 
dall  that,  if  he  believed  he  were  here  simply  to 
usher  in  something  higher  than  himself  in  which 
he  could  have  no  personal  part  or  lot,  he  should 
feel  that  a  liberty  had  been  taken  with  him.^  The 
phrase  is  a  pregnant  one.  No  one  can  think  with 
equanimity  of  men  Hke  Hallam  and  Tennyson,  and 
no  one  is  willing  to  think  of  himself,  as  represent- 
ing nothing  but  a  transitory  crop  planted  merely  to 
be  ploughed  in  for  the  sake  of  enriching  the  earth 
which  may  then  bear  a  better,  —  a  sort  of  high- 
grade  cosmic  fertihzer.  There  is  a  spirit  in  man 
which  resents  this.  "  In  Memoriam "  evokes  this 
spirit,  questions  it,  makes  it  bear  what  witness  it 
can  to  man's  experience  as  well  as  to  his  needs ; 
and  then,  with  full  recognition  of  the  illimitable 
scope  of  the  unknown,  decides  that,  in  light  of  the 
known,  faith  is  the  rational  hypothesis  for  the  guid- 
ance of  life. 

That  life  is  ever  Lord  of  Death 
And  love  can  never  lose  its  own. 

*  Alfred f  Lord  Tennyson,  vol.  ii,  p.  474. 


378  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

This  is,  roughly  speaking,  Tennyson's  constructive 
argument,  not  only  in  "  In  Memoriam,"  but  through- 
out the  remainder  of  his  work.  Only  very  rarely  does 
any  dogmatic  note  sound  in  his  utterance  of  it.  Quite 
as  often  it  is  only  implicit ;  though  as  time  passed 
he  felt  the  natural  impulse  of  age  explicitly  to  em- 
phasize his  convictions.  Hence  poems  like  "  De  Pro- 
fundis,"  "Despair,"  "In  the  Children's  Hospital," 
—  although  it  would  not  be  fair  to  ascribe  the  ar- 
gument of  the  Hospital  Nurse  unreservedly  to  the 
poet,  —  and  most  notably  "  The  Ancient  Sage," 
are  primarily  religious  and  even  theological  in  their 
motive. 

O  worms  and  maggots  of  to-day 
Without  their  hope  of  wings  ! 

Thus  "  The  Ancient  Sage  "  restates  the  poet's  con- 
viction that  the  things  of  the  Spirit  are  life's  ulti- 
mate realities  and  that  he  who  neglects  them  walks 
in  a  vain  show.  These  poems  set  forth  with  com- 
pelling eloquence  the  truth  that  life  depends  on 
faith,  and,  lacking  it,  is  bound  to  pine  and  dwindle 
on  the  one  hand,  or  else  go  mad  with  hopelessness 
upon  the  other. 

The  "  Idylls  "  represent  the  ethical  or  practically 
religious  side  of  this  truth.  They  have  the  same 
relation  to  a  completely  developed  epic  that  "In 
Memoriam  "  has  to  a  perfect  elegy.  Both  are  poems 
made  up  of  related  fragments,  the  difference  being 
that  the  elegy  bears  this  treatment  better  than  the 
epic.  The  allegorical  element  in  the  "  Idylls,"  more- 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  379 

over,  doubtless  interferes  in  some  degree  with  the 
development  of  the  epic  as  a  whole ;  but  I  do  not 
think  that  the  allegory  was  so  overworked  by  Ten- 
nyson as  the  criticism  of  it  has  been  by  his  critics. 
That  the  poems  show  "sense  at  war  with  soul" 
is  so  evident  as  scarcely  to  need  statement.  The 
reader  will  best  catch  their  meaning  and  learn  their 
lesson  who  contents  himself  with  this  simple  an- 
nouncement of  their  purpose  and  rests  in  it.  All 
effort  to  identify  characters  with  specific  institu- 
tions or  qualities  befogs  both  the  literary  and  the 
moral  issues.  No  doubt  the  Lady  of  the  Lake  may 
represent  the  Church,  but  she  is  far  more  effective 
artistically  and  ethically  as  an  incidental  figure  in 
Arthur's  story  than  she  can  be  as  an  Institution. 

Meanwhile  the  "Idylls''  justify  their  hold  upon 
the  world  with  every  fresh  reading.  They  are  ro- 
mantic in  the  best  sense;  pathetic,  too,  with  much 
of  the  true  Virgilian  tears-of -things;  musical  be- 
yond expression  except  by  their  own  words;  clean 
with  an  essential  purity,  although  dealing  explicitly 
with  a  tragedy  in  which  a  harlot  and  an  adulteress 
have  large  part;  and  seasoned  always  with  a  com- 
mon sense  which,  if  it  cannot  supply  the  spice  of 
humour,  at  least  saves  sentiment  from  degenerat- 
ing into  mawkishness.  Much  might  be  said  upon 
this  last  point;  because  it  has  become  the  fashion 
to  treat  the  "Idylls"  as  though  their  ideal  were 
a  sort  of  bloodless  austerity.  There  are  some  to 
whom  a  red  flower  seems  to  offer  as  fitting  a  sym- 


380  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

bol  of  blameless  life  as  a  white  flower ;  and  I  con- 
fess to  membership  in  that  company;  yet,  barring 
the  literal  fact  of  the  symbol's  use,  —  and  he  must 
be  captious  indeed  who  really  begrudges  the  lily 
its  time-honoured  office,  —  it  seems  to  me  that  the 
preeminent  lesson  of  the  "Idylls"  is  very  much 
the  lesson  of  a  robust  and  rational  Christianity.  A 
man's  life  consisteth  neither  in  the  thino^s  which 
he  possesseth,  nor  yet  in  the  things  which  he  re- 
nounces ;  neither  in  luxurious  wealth  nor  in  ascetic 
poverty,  but  in  self-fulfilment  according  to  the  will 
of  God  and  the  need  of  men.  Arthur  is  a  very 
high  type  of  man;  but  his  limitations  are  patent 
to  us,  and  before  he  passed  became  evident  to 
himself. 

"  I  found  Hira  in  the  shining  of  the  stars, 
I  marked  Him  in  the  flowering  of  His  fields, 
But  in  His  ways  with  men  I  find  Him  not." 

"  Self -reverence,  self-knowledge,  self-control,"  Ten- 
nyson's early  trinity  of  virtues,  are  highly  devel- 
oped in  Arthur,  but  he  lacks  exactly  this  vision 
of  God  immanent  in  man,  making  all  life  sacred. 
Merciful  he  is,  and  humane  in  the  narrower  sense ; 
but  not  with  the  humanity  which  flowers  into  sym- 
pathy and  quick  understanding  of  man's  tempta- 
tions and  pettinesses.  Hence  it  is — and  the  touch 
is  a  stroke  of  pure  genius — that  Arthur  is  some- 
times thrown  by  Lancelot  when  jousting,  but  is 
always  mightier  than  he  in  the  field  of  genuine 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  381 

battle.  He  represents  the  righteous  man,  pure  in 
heart,  a  lion  in  courage,  absolute  in  his  allegiance 
to  duty,  whose  goodness  is  yet  touched  with  pallor. 
With  a  little  of  Lancelot's  capacity  for  passion, 
the  tragedy  of  his  Round  Table  and  his  Queen 
might  have  been  averted;  but  to  have  added  this 
to  all  the  rest  would  have  been  to  write  something 
other  than  the  "  Idylls." 

In  the  poems  as  they  stand  we  have  a  faithful 
and  a  marvellously  beautiful  picture  of  the  higher 
man  striving  to  dominate  complex  circumstance 
and  bend  it  to  the  highest  purposes.  The  complex- 
ity is  as  Protean  and  baffling  as  that  of  weather; 
the  very  forces  which  seem  fair  to-day  beat  him 
back  to-morrow.  The  tragedy  and  the  pathos  ap- 
pear less  in  the  wilfulness  wherewith  evil  men,  and 
most  notably  one  evil  woman,  Vivian,  oppose  all 
of  good  that  the  King  can  devise,  than  in  the  per- 
versity of  fate  whereby,  on  the  one  hand,  Guine- 
vere and  Lancelot  are  thrown  together  and  led  to 
mutual  and  widespreading  ruin,  and,  on  the  other, 
the  flower  of  the  Round  Table  Knights  are  dis- 
persed in  a  time  of  grievous  need  upon  a  chase 
after  wandering  fires. 

The  mystic  vision  of  the  Grail  is  not  life's  end. 
Ethereal  souls  like  Galahad  and  Perci vale's  sister 
may  see  and  profit  by  the  revelation ;  it  may  come 
as  a  great  reward  to  Sir  Bors,  willing  to  be  blind 
to  it  if  only  Lancelot  might  see  and  be  comforted ; 
and  a  distant  glimpse  is  vouchsafed  to  faithful  Per- 


382  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

civale  :  but  better  upon  the  whole  seems  the  lot  of 
the  homely  priest  to  whom  Percivale  tells  his  tale, 
and  better  far  the  lot  of  Arthur ;  since  to  him  in  the 
midst  of  his  toilsome  career  there  come  — 

"  Moments  when  he  feels  he  cannot  die. 
And  knows  himself  no  vision  to  himself, 
Nor  the  high  God  a  vision,  nor  that  One 
Who  rose  again. 

"  So  spake  the  King :  I  know  not  all  he  meant," 

says  Percivale,  acknowledging  half  unconsciously 
that,  while  the  ascetic  may  hear  an  inspiring  echo, 
the  Voice  itself  speaks  most  often  to  the  man  in  the 
midst  of  life's  conflict. 

Much  might  be  made  of  the  extent  to  which  Ten- 
nyson lays  Scripture  scenes  and  language  under 
tribute  in  the  "Idylls."  Sometimes  a  line  like  — 

If  I  lose  myself,  I  save  myself ! 

runs  like  a  refrain  through  a  poem,  and  sometimes 
an  episode  hinges  upon  the  less  explicit  teaching  of 
the  Gospels.  The  Duke  of  Argyll  was  once  walking 
in  the  poet's  garden,  when  Tennyson,  who  had  pre- 
ceded him  along  a  path,  suddenly  turned  and  blurted 
out, "  I  hate  scorn."  ^  Twice  at  least  in  the  "  Idylls" 
the  same  feeling  that  no  man  is  to  be  treated  with 
mere  contempt,^  finds  utterance;  once  when  Lance- 
lot detects  Modred  playing  spy,  and  again  when 
Guinevere  in  her  penitence  says  of  Arthur, — 

1  Alfred,  Lord  Tennyson^  vol.  ii,  p.  614. 
«  Cf.  St.  Matthew,  v,  22. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  383 

"  but  he  never  mocks, 
For  mockery  is  the  fume  of  little  hearts." 

So  too,  in  Ulysses,  the  modern  idea  of  faith  as 
moulded  by  experience  is  illustrated  by  the  lines :  — 

Yet  all  experience  is  an  arch  wherethro' 

Gleams  that  untravell'd  world,  whose  margin  fades 

For  ever  and  for  ever  when  I  move  ; 

and  better  still  perhaps,  though  unconsciously,  by 
the  twelve  windows  in  Merlin's  great  hall  at  Came- 
lot  which  were  emblazoned  with  the  story  of  Arthur's 
wars :  — 

And  all  the  light  that  falls  upon  the  board 
Streams  thro'  the  twelve  great  battles  of  our  King. 

The  subject  cannot  be  left  without  some  reference 
to  Tennyson's  pathos.  A  word  however  must  suffice, 
not  merely  because  of  limitations  of  space  but  because 
the  quality  is  too  delicate  to  bear  formal  discussion. 
I  should  hesitate  to  say  that  Tennyson  had  a  ^  com- 
mand of  the  pathetic'  If  such  a  phrase  mean  any- 
thing it  would  seem  to  imply  that  he  sometimes  sat 
down  with  deliberate  purpose  to  reach  and  wring 
men's  hearts.  Dickens,  at  his  worst,  was  capable  of 
this,  and  his  facility  at  it  would  have  damned  him 
almost  irretrievably  had  he  not  possessed  very  great 
redeeming  qualities.  Tennyson  hated  sentimentality, 
although  the  circumstances  of  "  The  May  Queen  " 
and  "  Enoch  Arden  "  beguiled  him  into  the  edge  of 
its  territory.  The  appeal  of  "Enoch  Arden"  — 
and  it  has  been  more  often  and  widely  translated, 


384  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

I  believe,  than  any  other  of  Tennyson's  poems  — 
is,  however,  the  honest  appeal  of  genuine  tragedy 
very  simply  and  naturally  portrayed/  Tennyson's 
command  of  our  hearts  is  far  more  potent  than  any 
mere  ability  to  tell  a  pitiful  story  could  justify.  He 
had  the  mystic's  sense  of  the  fleeting  unreality  of 
the  seen  and  temporal.  Sometimes  this  finds  ex- 
plicit utterance,  as  in  the  words  of  one  who  — 

hath  heard 
Time  flowing  in  the  middle  of  the  night 
And  all  things  creeping  to  a  day  of  doom.^ 

Again,  as  in  "  The  Palace  of  Art,"  he  propounds  to 

us  — 

The  riddle  of  the  painful  earth,  — 

and  does  it  graciously  enough  to  stir  our  hearts  ra- 
ther than  our  bile.  But  he  is  most  genuinely  poignant 
when  simply  echoing  his  own  deep  sense  of  the 
mystery  of  time's  passing  and  earth's  common  joys, 
sorrows,  and  fidelities.  Here,  better  than  any  other 
modern  poet,  he  deserves  his  own  tribute  to  Virgil, 

*  Walter  Bagehot,  whose  critical  touch  is  generally  so  firm  and 
sure,  certainly  blunders  in  his  criticism  of  Tennyson  for  endowing 
a  fisherman-sailor  with  Enoch  Arden's  high  qualities.  Tennyson,  like 
FitzGerald,  knew  the  East  Coast,  and  knew  too  that  it  is  exactly 
among  simple  and  often  rude  sea-faring  folk  that  fine  feeling  and 
capacity  for  heroism  are  latent.  As  illustrating  the  poet's  dread  of 
effusive  praise  or  too  searching  an  inquiry  into  his  private  views, 
may  be  cited  his  first  conversation  with  Frederick  Robertson.  He 
had  already  learned  to  admire  the  preacher  and  his  work  ;  but  fear- 
ful of  too  intimate  an  interview  on  this  occasion  he  obstinately  re- 
fused to  discuss  any  other  subject  than  Beer, 

'  Brooke,  Poetry  of  Tennyson,  p.  68. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  385 

All  the  charm  of  all  the  Muses  often  flowering  in  a  lonely 
word. 

It  is  this  consciousness  of  himself  as  "  in  the  world 
but  not  of  it "  that  breathes  through  a  song  like  — 

Tears,  idle  tears,  I  know  not  what  they  mean, 
Tears  from  the  depth  of  some  divine  despair 
Rise  in  the  heart  and  gather  to  the  eyes, 
In  looking  on  the  happy  autumn  fields, 
And  thinking  of  the  days  that  are  no  more. 

Little  as  such  beauty  lends  itseK  to  analysis  the 
most  careless  reader  notes  the  lack  of  bitterness  in 
the  poet's  sorrow.  The  tears  are  distilled  from  a 
beating  heart  rather  than  wrung  from  a  broken  one; 
and  the  despair,  if  despair  it  be,  is  still  divine.  Dis- 
tance, loneliness,  the  flight  of  time,  all  things  that 
accentuate  a  man's  individual  existence  haunt  this 
poet  —  but  in  the  breast  of  their  sorrow,  hope  al- 
ways beats.  The  lines  from  "  The  Ancient  Sage  " 
are  now  familiar:  — 

for  oft 
On  me,  when  boy,  there  came  what  then  I  call'd 

In  my  boy  phrase  "  The  Passion  of  the  Past.** 

The  first  gray  streak  of  earliest  summer-dawn, 

The  last  long  stripe  of  waning  crimson  gloom, 

As  if  the  late  and  early  were  but  one  — 

A  height,  a  broken  grange,  a  grove,  a  flower 

Had  murmurs,  "  Lost  and  gone  and  lost  and  gone !  " 

A  breath,  a  whisper  —  some  divine  farewell  — 

Desolate  sweetness  —  far  and  far  away  — 

What  had  he  loved,  what  had  he  lost,  the  boy  ? 


386  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

One  cannot  but  contrast  this  Sense  of  the  Past, 
with  its  consciousness  of  loss  but  its  instinctive  in- 
sistence upon  a  gain  to  come  out  of  the  future  which 
shall  redress  it,  — 

As  if  the  late  and  early  were  but  one  — 

with  the  exquisite  hopelessness  of  such  verse  as  Mrs. 
Meynell's  Threnody :  — 

Beloved,  thou  art  like  a  tune  that  idle  fingers 

Play  on  a  window-pane, 
The  time  is  there,  the  form  of  music  lingers ; 

But  O,  thou  sweetest  strain, 
Where  is  thy  soul  ?  Thou  liest  i'  the  wind  and  rain. 

Tennyson's  demand  and  expectation  of  life,  from 
"  Ulysses  "  to  "  Crossing  the  Bar,"  is,  on  the  other 
hand,  — 

The  wages  of  going  on  and  not  to  die. 

With  his  brother  poet  he  nobly  illustrates  the  truth 
of  F.  W.  H.  Myers's  remark  that,  "  In  an  epoch  of 
transition  and  bewilderment  great  souls  make  the 
surest  harbourage."  * 

Exactly  these  same  wages  for  life's  toil  were  de- 
manded and  expected  by  Browning.  This  view  of 
life  and  death  was  implicit  in  all  his  work,  and  clearly 
uttered  at  its  close  in  "Asolando."  The  difference 
in  manner  between  the  two  poets  is  so  marked  and 
so  easily  emphasized  to  the  point  of  contrast,  as  to 
blind  the  casual  reader  to  their  practical  identity  of 

*  "  Modern  Poets  and  the  Meaning  of  Life,"  Nineteenth  Century, 
January,  1893. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  387 

conviction  and  substance.  Browning's  humour,  for 
instance,  is  as  rich  and  frequent  as  Tennyson's  is 
rare.  Sometimes  it  fairly  overdoes  itself  and  becomes 
farcical,  as  in  the  section  of  "  Sordello  "  in  which 
St.  John  mistakes  his  own  poor  portrait  for  a  pic- 
ture of  the  Devil.  Yet  even  in  these  cases,  where  we 
could  desire  greater  restraint,  the  farce  is  a  natu- 
rally luxuriant  growth;  it  is  never  manufactured 
and  then  dragged  in  for  effect.  The  two  poets  also 
stand  side  by  side  in  the  possession  of  lyric  powers 
whose  exercise  could  melt  men's  hearts.  Browning 
used  his  gift  less  frequently  than  Tennyson,  but 
when  he  chose  to  exercise  it,  the  result  was  unfor- 
gettable. 

O  lyric  Love,  half  angel  and  half  bird, 
And  all  a  wonder  and  a  wild  desire  — 

remains  at  the  end  of  the  first  section  of  "  The  Ring 
and  the  Book  "  to  bear  him  witness.  He,  too,  knew 
the  "  Passion  of  the  Past  "  and  prays,  — 

That  still,  despite  the  distance  and  the  dark, 
What  was,  again  may  be. 

Generally,  however,  his  recollection  of  the  past  is 
brisk  and  cheerful  with  assurance  that  its  essence 
is  still  extant  and  remains  his  unfailing  possession. 

May's  warm,  slow,  yellow,  moonlit  summer  nights  ;  — 
Gone  are  they,  but  I  have  them  in  my  soul. 

These  words,  whatever  their  setting  in  "Pippa 
Passes,"  will  describe  his  general  attitude  toward 


388  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

past  experience,  as  the  other  lines  from  "James 
Lee's  Wife"  represent  his  splendid  confidence  in 
the  present  and  the  future :  — 

Rejoice  that  man  is  hurled 

From  change  to  change  unceasingly, 

His  soul's  wings  never  furled  ! 

Of  his  pathos,  I  suppose  that  Pompilia,  the  child- 
wife  and  mother,  is  commonly  reckoned  to  be  the 
great  exemplar.  The  heart  must  be  hard  indeed 
which  fails  to  yield  its  reverent  sympathy  to  her 
youth,  innocence,  suffering,  and  untimely  death.  Yet 
there  is  a  certain  softness  of  physical  fibre  about  her 
that  somehow  manages  to  reach  over  into  the  realm 
of  character ;  she  is  faintly  touched  with  the  negative 
quality  which  that  other  child-wife  in  "  David  Cop- 
perfield  "  incarnates  so  wof  ully.  This  is  not  to  insti- 
tute a  comparison  between  Pompilia  and  Dora;  the 
former  of  whom  is  one  of  the  significant  features  in  a 
great  poem,  while  the  latter  is  a  chief  blemish  in  a 
great  novel.  But  the  fate  of  Pompilia  inspires  a  phy- 
sical shudder ;  it  is  horrid  rather  than  pathetic.  One 
could  have  borne,  perhaps,  to  see  Mildred  Tresham 
stabbed,  had  it  been  necessary  to  the  tragedy  of 
"  A  Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon  " ;  she  was  of  tragic 
mould ;  but  Pompilia  !  —  it  is  like  reenacting  the 
Massacre  of  the  Innocents !  Browning's  pathos  is 
most  poignant  when  it  is  gentlest  and  simplest.  The 
passing  of  St.  John  in  "  A  Death  in  the  Desert " 
makes  no  special  demand  upon  us  for  any  feeling 
beyond  a  gracious  and  thankful  sadness ;  but  the 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  389 

poor  Bactrian,  who  kept  watch  by  the  cave's  mouth, 
grazing  his  goat  upon  the  rags  of  herbage,  and  fully 
intent  upon  yielding  up  his  life,  if  need  arose,  to 
shelter  those  within  the  cave  —  this  man  is  secure 
of  his  meed  of  fame  and  tears.  He  was  not  equal 
to  perpetuating  the  tradition  of  John's  death ;  but 
he  could  for  a  moment  interpose  a  humble  life  in 
order  that  the  master  might  pass  in  peace,  and  his 
disciples  gain  time  to  receive  his  dying  words. 

The  Bactrlan  was  but  a  wild  childish  man 
And  could  not  write  nor  speak,  but  only  loved. 

The  closing  lines  of  the  story,  too,  are  marked  by 
so  sweet  a  simplicity  as  to  compel  the  reader  to 
wish  that  Browning  had  oftener  exercised  his  gift 
in  this  direction  :  — 

Believe  ye  will  not  see  him  any  more 
About  the  world  with  his  divine  regard ! 
For  all  was  as  I  say,  and  now  the  man 
Lies  as  he  lay  once,  breast  to  breast  with  God. 

Browning's  friend  "  Waring  "  ^  once  called  him 
the  "  subtlest  assertor  of  the  soul  in  song,"  and  the 
saying  is  as  true  as  it  is  sibilant.  No  further  answer 
than  the  multitude  of  Browning  Societies  need  be 
given  to  those  who  assert  or  fancy  that  theology's 
day  is  past  and  that  religion  ceases  to  hold  the  at- 
tention of  the  thoughtful.  Whatever  tempted  or  in- 
spired men ;  everything  that  enhanced  or  debased 
their  personality;  the  mystery  of  their  three  score 

»  Mr.  Alfred  Domett. 


390  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  ten  years  and  their  insistent  claim  upon  a  life 
beyond  that  term,  —  all  these  things  fascinated  him 
and  wrought  themselves  over  into  poetry  in  the 
alembic  of  his  mind.  "  Paracelsus  "  and  "  Sordello" 
represent  in  their  several  ways  the  element  of  spir- 
itual adventure  to  which  religion  invites  us,  and 
without  which  it  degenerates  into  mere  formality. 
"  Saul  "  and  "  Cleon  "  speak  of  the  inappeasable 
hunger  of  the  soul  for  God  and  immortality.  "  An 
Epistle"  and  "  A  Death  in  the  Desert "  remind  us 
of  the  inevitable  appeal  made  by  Jesus  Christ  even 
though  He  be  considered  as  a  mere  incident  or 
phenomenon  of  history.  "Christmas  Eve"  and 
"Easter  Day"  are  as  frankly  theological  as  New- 
man's "  Apologia  "  or  "  Grammar  of  Assent." 
"  Pippa  Passes"  and  "  The  King  and  the  Book  "  are 
far  too  great  and  comprehensive  to  be  characterized 
in  a  sentence ;  but  in  them  both,  sometimes  explicitly, 
and  more  often  by  suggestion,  the  poet  echoes  St. 
Paul's  reasoning  of  "  righteousness,  temperance,  and 
judgement  to  come." 

Pippa's  song,  so  often  and  unintelligently  quoted 
as  though  it  numbered  Browning  among  the  dog- 
matic optimists,  really  has  a  far  deeper  significance 
than  that.  It  is  the  chance  unreasoning  utterance 
of  a  happy  little  working  girl  upon  the  morning  of 
a  holiday ;  it  penetrates  not  the  ears  only  but  the 
fleshly  hearts  of  an  adulteress  and  the  paramour 
who  has  just  murdered  her  husband.  Here  lies  the 
wonder  of  the  thing ;  that  this  child's  thoughtless 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  391 

assertion,  moved  as  she  is  to  utter  it  by  the  appeal 
of  springtime  to  her  innocent  heart,  — 

"  God  's  in  His  heaven  — 
All 's  right  with  the  world  !  "  — 

should  bring  a  murderer  to  himself,  so  that  Sebald 
echoes  breathlessly, — 

"  God  's  in  His  heaven  !    Do  you  hear  that  ?    Who  spoke  ?  '* 

and  a  little  later,  speaking  both  of  and  to  Ottima, 
he  sets  forth  inimitably  the  old  attempt  of  the  flesh 
to  strangle  the  spirit. 

<*  To  think 
She  would  succeed  in  her  absurd  attempt, 
And  fascinate  by  sinning,  show  herself 
Superior  —  guilt  from  its  excess  superior 
To  innocence  !  That  little  peasant's  voice 
Has  righted  all  again.  Though  I  be  lost, 
I  know  which  is  the  better,  never  fear, 
Of  vice  OP  virtue,  purity  or  lust, 
Nature  or  trick  !  I  see  what  I  have  done, 
Entirely  now !  Oh,  I  am  proud  to  feel 
Such  torments  —  " 

It  is  not  exactly  the  sorrow  of  repentance,  but 
rather  the  reassertion  of  manhood  after  a  term  of 
bondage  to  greed  and  lust.  This  is  typical  of  Brown- 
ing's method  in  using  religious  and  ethical  material. 
The  two  are  inextricably  mingled  by  nature,  repre- 
senting indeed  but  different  aspects  of  one  experi- 
ence. They  are  among  the  fundamental  things  for 
"which  man  has  innate  appetite.  Every  man  when 
he  is  most  himself  recognizes  that  they  concern  him. 


392  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  poet  rarely  cares  to  assert  this  dogmatically^ 
preferring  to  show  it  by  example  in  taking  such 
themes  for  his  most  telling  work.  He  is  careful,  too, 
to  admit  the  subtle  complexities  and  difficulties  as 
well  as  the  great  simplicities  of  religion.  Sometimes 
the  matter  is  dealt  with  half  whimsically,  as  in  the 
marvellously  clever  monologue  of  Bishop  Blougram 
over  his  wine  and  walnuts  ;  sometimes  grotesquely 
almost  to  the  point  of  caricature,  as  in  "  Caliban 
upon  Setebos  ";  and  yet  again  with  a  high  and  wist- 
ful seriousness,  as  by  Cleon,  and  the  Pope  in  "  The 
Ring  and  the  Book." 

One  great  reason  of  Browning's  early  neglect  and 
later  vogue  has  been  that  he  anticipated  with  so  sure 
an  instinct  the  analytical  tendency  of  the  latter  half 
of  his  century,  when  science  strove  to  bring  all  things 
in  heaven  and  earth  to  the  dissecting  table.^  An- 
other lies  in  an  extraordinary  insight  into  the  depths 
of  man's  soul  which  makes  the  reading  of  some  of 
his  poems  seem  like  an  anticipation  of  the  day  when 
the  secrets  of  all  hearts  shall  be  revealed.  A  third 
is  to  be  found  in  his  large  use  in  argument  of  a  phi- 
losophical method  now  particularly  known  as  Hu- 
manism or  Pragmatism.  In  "  A  Death  in  the  Desert " 
St.  John  argues,  to  be  sure,  that  if  man  were  as 
certain  of  the  worth  of  Christ  as  he  is  of  the  worth 
of  fire,  all  would  accept  Him,  there  would  be  no 
room  for  doubt  or  question,  and  — 

*  This  fact  has  been  interestingly  developed  by  Mr.  Stopford 
Brooke  in  bis  Poetry  of  Robert  Browning^  p.  8. 


THE  GREAT  TWIN  BRETHREN  393 

Man's  probation  would  conclude,  his  earth 
Crumble. 

Yet,  after  all,  the  poet  is  always  recurring  to  exactly 
this  argument.  Religion  is  as  necessary  and  whole- 
some to  a  man's  soul  as  bread  to  his  body.  Some 
faith  in  God,  Duty,  Immortality,  is  as  needful  to 
the  breath  of  his  soul's  life  during  this  present 
winter  of  his  discontent  as  is  fire  to  his  household's 
health.  Bishop  Blougram  is  a  somewhat  doubtful 
ally,  to  be  sure,  but  he  reaches  a  fundamental  ex- 
perience in  saying,  — 

Belief's  fire,  once  in  us, 
Makes  of  all  else  mere  stuff  to  show  itself ; 
We  penetrate  our  life  with  such  a  glow 
As  fire  lends  wood  and  iron  —  this  turns  steel, 
That  burns  to  ash  — 

The  secret  of  Browning's  widespread  and  benefi- 
cent influence,  as  well  as  the  guarantee  of  his  fame, 
lies  not  merely  in  his  art,  grotesque  and  wilfvd  as 
it  often  was;  nor  in  his  unique  power  of  analy- 
sis ;  nor  yet  in  his  happy  choice  of  a  philosophical 
method  which  was  about  to  become  popular;  nor 
even  in  the  robust  and  good-humoured  cheerful- 
ness which  gives  a  glow  of  genuine  health  to  his 
work  as  a  whole;  but  rather  in  the  fact  that, 
though  a  poet  endowed  with  transcendent  gifts, 
he  was  yet  so  representative  a  man  in  his  feeling 
upon  the  deepest  matters  of  doubt  and  faith. 

The  sum  of  all  is  —  yes,  my  doubt  is  great, 
My  faith 's  still  greater,  then  my  faith  *8  enough. 


CHAPTER  XII 

DARWIN   AND    HIS   PLOUGHSHARE 

George  John  Romanes  was  the  son  of  a  Scots 
Presbyterian  clergyman,  resident  in  Kingston,  Can- 
ada, as  Professor  of  Greek  in  Queen's  College. 
Following  his  birth,  in  1848,  the  family  left  America 
and  after  several  years  of  travel  settled  in  London. 
Romanes  received  a  rather  desultory  education, 
and  finally  went  to  Cambridge  with  the  idea  of 
fitting  himself  to  take  orders  in  the  Church  of 
England.  This  purpose  he  cherished  for  several 
years,  but  before  taking  a  degree,  found  his  inter- 
est enlisted  so  heartily  by  scientific  studies  as  to 
change  his  plans,  win  a  scholarship  in  science,  and 
turn  more  or  less  definitely  toward  the  profession 
of  medicine.  It  was  in  the  field  of  biology,  how- 
ever, that  he  was  finally  to  do  his  life-work  and 
gain  a  considerable  recognition.  I  use  his  name  to 
introduce  this  chapter,  not  because  he  is  to  be  re- 
garded as  a  Darwinian  of  unique  gifts  or  authority, 
— although  his  gifts  were  exceptional  and  his  au- 
thority eminent,  —  but  because  of  a  representative 
if  not  typical  element  in  his  experience.  His  first 
acquaintance  with  Darwin's  books  marked  an  epoch 
in  his  life.  Circumstances  eventually  brought  the 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  395 

two  men  together,  and,  until  the  master's  death  in 
1882,  he  had  no  more  devoted  disciple.  This  inti- 
macy was  indeed  close  enough  to  put  us  in  Ro- 
manes's debt  for  some  glimpses  of  Darwin's  gra- 
cious simplicity  of  character  which  could  ill  have 
been  spared.  The  younger  man  was,  however,  no 
unquestioning  devotee.  He  accepted  Darwin's  great 
hypothesis  as  he  accepted  Herbert  Spencer's  phi- 
losophy, with  a  willing  yet  critical  mind;  and  in 
due  time  made  his  own  contribution  to  the  doc- 
trine of  development  under  the  title  of  "Physi- 
ological Selection."  I  have  no  especial  competence 
to  appraise  its  value,  nor,  indeed,  to  estimate  the 
importance  of  any  portion  of  Romanes's  investiga- 
tions in  the  field  of  nervous  function  and  compara- 
tive intelligence. 

It  is  less  difficult  to  characterize  his  quality  as  a 
man ;  for  he  was  singularly  happy,  not  only  by 
natural  endowment,  but  in  the  circumstances  of 
his  short  life.  Well  born  and  well  bred,  happily 
married  and  entirely  well-to-do,  with  a  rich  nature 
which  drank  life  in  from  all  pure  sources  and  im- 
parted it  generously,  not  only  to  his  family  and  a 
host  of  friends  but  to  a  wider  circle  whose  claims 
some  men  would  have  ignored,  he  represents  al- 
most uniquely  the  human er  side  of  that  singular 
mixture  of  idol  and  bogey  known  to  the  modern 
world  as  a  ^man  of  science.'  His  especial  claim 
upon  our  attention  is  due  to  the  significant  cycle 
through  which  within  about  a  score  of  years  his 


396  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

opinions  seem  to  have  passed.  In  1873,  in  his 
twenty-fifth  year,  Romanes  won  the  Burney  Prize 
at  Cambridge  with  an  essay  upon  "  Christian  Prayer 
and  General  Laws."  This  was  his  first  pubHshed 
book,  and  in  it,  almost  as  a  matter  of  course,  he 
upheld  the  orthodox  views  of  the  day.  The  book 
was,  however,  a  herald  of  revolution.  Its  author 
had  already  become  a  convert  to  the  great  develop- 
ment theory  then  going  forth  conquering  and  to 
conquer ;  but  though  acquainted  with  Spencer's 
general  exposition  of  it,  he  had  not  yet  pondered 
the  special  application  and  illustration  which  it  had 
received  at  the  hands  of  Darwin.  As  this  grew  upon 
him,  a  profound  change  took  place  in  his  views. 
Five  years  after  winning  the  Burney  Prize  he  pub- 
lished, anonymously,  "  A  Candid  Examination  of 
Theism,"  which  had,  however,  been  written  several 
years  earlier.  In  it  he  frankly  faced  the  necessity 
of  atheism,  though  with  the  confession  that  for 
himself  it  could  be  accepted  with  no  equal  mind. 

The  passage  which  laments  his  lost  faith  has 
been  quoted  so  often  as  to  be  almost  hackneyed ; 
yet  a  repetition  here  is  justified  by  its  eloquent 
suggestion  of  the  relation  which  is  bound  to  de- 
clare itself  between  every  great  discovery  in  the 
field  of  science  and  man's  religious  nature. 

"  So  far  as  I  am  individually  concerned,"  he  says, 
"the  result  of  this  analysis  has  been  to  show  that, 
whether  I  regard  the  problem  of  Theism  on  the 
lower  plane  of  strictly  relative  probability,  or  on 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  397 

the  higher  plane  of  purely  formal  considerations,  it 
equally  becomes  my  obvious  duty  to  stifle  all  belief 
of  the  kind  which  I  conceive  to  be  the  noblest,  and 
to  discipline  my  intellect  with  regard  to  this  matter 
into  an  attitude  of  the  purest  scepticism.  And,  for- 
asmuch as  I  am  far  from  being  able  to  agree  with 
those  who  affirm  that  the  twilight  doctrine  of  the 
'new  faith'  is  a  desirable  substitute  for  the  waning 
splendour  of  '  the  old/  I  am  not  ashamed  to  con- 
fess that  with  this  virtual  negation  of  God  the 
universe  to  me  has  lost  its  soul  of  loveliness ;  and 
although  from  henceforth  the  precept  to  'work 
while  it  is  day '  will  doubtless  but  gain  an  intensi- 
fied force  from  the  terribly  intensified  meaning  of 
the  words  that  'the  night  cometh  when  no  man 
can  work/  yet  when  at  times  I  think,  as  think  at 
times  I  must,  of  the  appalling  contrast  between  the 
hallowed  glory  of  that  creed  which  once  was  mine, 
and  the  lonely  mystery  of  existence  as  now  I  find 
it,  —  at  such  times  I  shall  ever  feel  it  impossible 
to  avoid  the  sharpest  pang  of  which  my  nature  is 
susceptible."  * 

A  distinguished  journalist,  Mr.  W.  J.  Stillman, 
has  left  on  record  his  belief  that  in  the  majority  of 
cases  a  man  will  return,  if  time  enough  be  granted, 
to  the  essential  substance  if  not  to  the  form  of  the 
religious  faith  in  which  his  youth  was  nourished, 
however  wide  may  have  been  his  intermediate 
departure  from  it.  To  this  law,  if  law  it  be,  the 
'  rationalists '  who  still  grieve  over  Romanes's  course 
must  go  for  comfort.    He  could  not  rest  in  the 

*  Romanes's  Thoughts  on  Religion^  Editor's  Preface,  pp.  28-29. 


398  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

conclusions  of  his  own  "  Candid  Examination." 
While  his  interest  in  scientific  study  continued  un- 
abated, and  his  assurance  of  the  value  of  Darwin's 
great  hypothesis  was  never  shaken,  he  found  him- 
self instinctively  seeking  a  wider  platform  for 
thought  and  life  than  that  from  which  he  had 
proclaimed  his  scepticism.  He  made,  or  supposed 
himself  to  have  made,  an  arrangement  with  his 
publishers  by  which  no  second  edition  of  the  "  Can- 
did Examination  "  should  be  published ;  ^  and  by 
the  time  his  Rede  Lecture  was  delivered,  in  1885,  it 
became  evident  that  his  views  had  undergone  con- 
siderable chansfe.^ 

In  1889  he  delivered  an  address  at  Toynbee  Hall 
upon  the  Ethical  Teaching  of  Christ,  which  con- 
tained these  words  :  "  Whatever  answers  different 
persons  may  give  to  the  questions,  '  What  think 
ye  of  Christ  ?  Whose  Son  is  He  ? '  Every  one  must 
agree  that  ^  His  name  shall  be  called  wonderful.'  " 
It  seems  a  sufficiently  harmless  conclusion  even  for 
a  sceptic,  in  view  of  the  history  of  nineteen  at  least 
partially  Christian  centuries;  but  it  was  too  much 
for  some  of  the  faithful,  and  brought  Romanes  a 
letter  from  an  earnest  agnostic  lady  protesting 
against  attaching  so  much  importance  to  the  ^^  Pea- 
sant of  Nazareth."^  His  course  was  now  pretty 
clearly  determined,  and  it  is  scarcely  too  much  to 

*  See  Thoughts  on  Religion^  p.  104,  note. 
2  Thoughts  on  Religion^  p.  31. 

*  Life  and  Letters  of  G.  J.  Romanes,  pp.  231-232. 


DAKWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  399 

say  that  the  chief  interests  of  his  remaining  five 
years  of  life  centred  upon  the  work  of  which  his 
"  Thoughts  on  Keligion "  represent  a  rough  but 
suggestive  outline.  His  conclusion  is  thus  stated :  — 

I  know  from  experience  the  intellectual  distrac- 
tions of  scientific  research,  philosophical  specula- 
tion, and  artistic  pleasures ;  but  am  also  well  aware 
that  even  when  all  are  taken  together  and  well  sweet- 
ened to  taste,  in  respect  of  consequent  reputation, 
means,  social  position,  etc.,  the  whole  concoction  is 
but  as  high  confectionery  to  a  starving  man.  ...  I 
take  it  then  as  unquestionably  true  that  this  whole 
negative  side  of  the  subject  proves  a  vacuum  in  the 
soul  of  man  which  nothing  can  fill  save  faith  in 
God."^ 

Romanes's  experience  has  value  for  the  student 
of  Darwinism  in  relation  to  religious  thought,  owing 
to  certain  typical  and  universal  elements  in  it.  As 
the  embryo  during  its  few  days  or  months  of  pre- 
natal life  roughly  sketches  the  progress  of  organic 
development  up  to  the  plane  upon  which  it  is  to  five, 
so  the  three  stages  of  his  spiritual  history  at  once 
reflected  the  general  attitude  of  man  face  to  face 
with  new  and  embarrassing  discoveries,  and  prefig- 
ured, at  least  in  some  degree,  the  spiritual  history  of 
his  generation.  The  world  at  large  may  well  take 
a  century  for  the  journey  which  this  intense  life 

*  TTiotights  on  Religion,  pp.  160-162.  I  say  nothing  above  about 
the  return  of  Romanes  into  the  communion  of  his  Church,  because  I 
am  unwilling  to  seem  to  make  capital  of  him  as  a  convert.  His  case 
is  cited,  as  I  have  indicated,  for  quite  another  purpose. 


400  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

effected  in  two  decades.  In  saying  this,  I  would  not 
imply  a  prediction  that  the  long  expected  'recon- 
ciliation of  science  and  religion' — one's  gorge 
rises  at  the  threadbare  phrase  —  is  to  take  place 
precisely  as  in  Romanes's  case.  But  it  requires  no 
very  uncommon  powers  to  discern  that  religion  and 
physical  science  are  likely  not  only  somehow  to  sur- 
vive, but  to  cultivate  the  art  of  living  together.  A 
modus  Vivendi  has  already  been  reached.  The  won- 
der really  is,  not  that  a  state  of  fear  and  hostility 
so  long  existed  between  the  theologian  and  the  bi- 
ologist, but  that  it  was  not  more  pronounced  and 
prolonged.  Each  is  illustrating  the  truth  in  the  He- 
gelian formula.  Thesis,  Antithesis,  Synthesis.  Both, 
in  the  earlier  stages  of  the  evolution  propaganda, 
were  inclined  to  be  dogmatic  in  stating  their  doc- 
trines; each  saw,  or  thought  he  saw,  in  the  claims 
of  his  fellow  the  opposite  and  enemy  of  his  own. 
It  sometimes  happens,  however,  that  men  oppose 
one  another  until  a  certain  community  of  interest 
and  mutual  understanding  springs  up  out  of  the 
conflict.  An  old  and  worthy  adversary  grows  to  be 
as  necessary  and  almost  as  highly  esteemed  as  an 
old  and  valued  friend;  until  Bellona  turns  peace- 
maker in  her  own  despite,  and  wins  at  least  a  mo- 
mentary place  among  the  children  of  God. 

In  the  present  case  the  conflict  has  been  a  source 
of  education  to  both  parties.  The  theologian  has 
learned  that  the  destruction  of  ideals  and  the  ex- 
tinction of  life's  beacons  has  no  place  in  the  plan 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  401 

of  physical  science ;  while  its  pursuit  of  truth  is 
an  eminently  spiritual  exercise,  indissolubly  linked 
to  the  health  and  well-being  of  religion.  The  fair- 
minded  devotee  of  physical  science  has  generally 
come  to  recognize  in  the  persistence  of  religion  a 
fact  so  significant  as  to  be  worthy  of  respect.  If  he 
be  genuinely  scientific  in  habit  he  must  admit  that 
the  history  and  present  experience  of  religion  are 
matters  bound  to  exercise  the  minds  of  thoughtful 
men ;  and  that  thus  the  theologian  finds  an  abun- 
dant charter  for  his  occupation.  Even  the  extraor- 
dinary agility  with  which  religious  faith  has  adapted 
itself  to  new  conditions,  and  the  degree  of  success 
with  which  it  has  striven  to  assimilate  new  truth, 
are  facts  which  have  meaning.  Granting  for  the 
moment  that  its  agility  has  been  sometimes  almost 
acrobatic,  and  its  assimilation  but  partial  and  dys- 
peptic, still  the  fact  remains  that  such  adaptation  to 
changed  circumstances  is  one  of  the  notes  of  strong 
and  deep-rooted  life.  No  doubt  all  this  is  trying  to 
a  certain  type  of  ^secular'  mind.  One  cannot  but 
feel  for  the  vexation  which  introduces  into  secidar- 
ist  literature  so  much  of  the  note  of  the  common 
scold.  Having  laboriously  slain  religion  at  night, 
it  is  of  course  harrowing  to  meet  him  in  the  morn- 
ing, coming  with  smiling  front,  as  a  bridegroom 
out  of  his  chamber,  and  rejoicing  as  a  strong  man 
to  run  a  race.  Yet  it  is  a  fact  for  the  scientific 
mind  to  take  due  account  of;  and  as  time  has  passed 
there  has  been  an  increasing  disposition  to  do  this 
with  fairness  and  good  temper. 


402  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Darwin  himself  set  his  disciples  a  great  example 
here.  No  one  accorded  a  more  searching  criticism 
to  the  theology  of  Romanes's  "  Candid  Examina- 
tion "  than  his  father  in  the  Gospel  of  Evolution. 

"  With  regard  to  your  great  leading  idea,"  wrote 
Darwin  in  1878,  "I  should  like  sometime  to  hear 
.  .  .  what  you  would  say  if  a  theologian  addressed 
you  as  follows  :  — 

" '  I  grant  you  the  attraction  of  gravity,  persist- 
ence of  force  (or  conservation  of  energy),  and  one 
kind  of  matter,  though  the  latter  is  an  immense 
admission ;  but  I  maintain  that  God  must  have 
given  such  attributes  to  this  force,  independently 
of  its  persistence,  that  under  certain  conditions  it 
develops  or  changes  into  light,  heat,  electricity, 
galvanism,  perhaps  even  life.  .  .  . 

"  '  Again,  I  maintain  that  matter,  though  it  may 
in  the  future  be  eternal,  was  created  by  God  with 
the  most  marvellous  affinities,  leading  to  complex 
definite  compounds  and  with  polarities  leading  to 
beautiful  crystals,  etc.,  etc.  You  cannot  prove  that 
matter  would  necessarily  possess  these  attributes. 
Therefore  you  have  no  right  to  say  that  you  have 
"  demonstrated "  that  all  natural  laws  necessarily 
follow  from  gravity,  the  persistence  of  force,  and 
existence  of  matter.  If  you  say  that  nebulous  matter 
existed  aboriginally  and  from  eternity  with  all  its 
present  complex  powers  in  a  potential  state,  you 
seem  to  me  to  beg  the  whole  question.' 

"  Please  observe,  it  is  not  I,  but  a  theologian 
who  has  thus  addressed  you,  but  I  could  not  answer 
him.^" 

*  Life  and  Letters  of  G.  J.  Romanes^  pp.  88-89. 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  403 

This  passage  is  so  characteristic  in  its  frankness, 
modesty,  fairness,  and  a  simplicity  so  naive  as  often 
to  produce  the  effect  of  the  most  delicate  irony,  that 
it  may  serve  to  introduce  its  author  into  our  discus- 
sion. The  main  outlines  of  his  generally  unevent- 
ful life  are  soon  sketched.  A  grandson  of  the  poet 
and  philosopher  Erasmus  Darwin,  and  the  son  of 
a  distinguished  and  highly  successful  Shrewsbury 
physician,  Charles  Darwin  grew  to  young  manhood 
without  giving  his  family  much  assurance  that  he 
would  attain  to  any  position  in  the  world  higher 
than  that  of  an  amiable  amateur  in  the  lesser  fields 
of  science.  Reversing  the  order  of  Romanes's  plans, 
he  began  with  his  brother  Erasmus  the  study  of 
medicine,  and  afterward,  on  going  to  Cambridge, 
looked  for  some  time  toward  the  Church.  It  was 
his  good  fortune,  however,  to  form  a  warm  friend- 
ship with  Henslow,  Professor  of  Botany,  who  was 
not  only  a  man  of  wide  learning  and  progressive 
habit  of  mind,  but  of  so  keen  a  vision  and  generous 
a  nature  that  he  at  once  discerned  something  of 
Darwin's  quality  and  did  much  to  rouse  his  enthu- 
siasm. Through  the  avenue  of  this  friendship  came 
the  opportunity  to  join  Captain  FitzRoy  and  the 
Beagle  in  their  memorable  voyage  around  the  world. 
The  five  years  spent  upon  this  expedition  represent 
Darwin's  sole  physical  adventure.  After  his  return 
in  1836,  his  happy  marriage,  and  his  settlement  at 
Down  in  1842,  he  proceeded  to  justify  his  early 
statement  to  Captain  FitzRoy:  "My  life  goes  on 


404  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

like  clock-work,  and  I  am  fixed  on  the  spot  where 
I  shall  end  it."  ' 

Here  he  gave  to  his  "  Naturalist's  Voyage  "  the 
form  which  has  won  for  it  place  and  fame  in  English 
Literature^;  here  too  he  pursued  researches,  the 
results  of  which,  when  finally  published  as  the 
"  Origin  of  Species  "  in  1859,  and  the  "  Descent  of 
Man ''  in  1871,  went  so  far  to  revolutionize  the 
forms  of  human  thought.  The  phrase  ^epoch-mak- 
ing book '  has  of  late  been  generally  given  over  to 
publishers'  advertisements  and  to  reviewers  of  the 
superlative  sort;  but  it  must  needs  be  recovered 
and  rededicated  whenever  reference  is  made  to 
Darwin's  work.  Even  now,  when  the  results  of  his 
labours  have  so  entered  into  the  substance  of  our 
thought  that  in  all  departments  of  knowledge  we 
take  instinctive  account  of  them,  we  find  ourselves 
too  near  the  period  of  upheaval  to  see  its  changes 
in  exact  proportion.  Some  idea  of  their  magnitude 
may  however  be  gained  by  any  intelHgent  person 
who  will  reread  the  Recapitulation  and  Conclu- 
sion of  the  "  Origin  of  Species,"  or  the  twenty-first 
chapter  of  Part  II  of  the  "  Descent  of  Man,"  con- 
trasting, as  he  does  so,  his  own  peace  of  mind  with 
the  mingled  exhilaration  and  dismay  caused  by  their 
first  appearance. 

1  Life  and  Letters  of  Charles  Dartoin,  vol.  i,  p.  287,  American 
edition. 

2  Its  substance  was  published  as  Volume  III  of  the  Journal  and 
Remarks  in  1839  ;  but  the  book  which  we  know  is  the  product  of 
the  revisions  of  1845  and  1860. 


DARWIN  AND   HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  405 

The  idea  of  derived  instead  of  ^created'  species 
had  of  course  been  more  or  less  familiar  to  scien- 
tific students  since  the  day  of  Lamarck.  Indeed,  one 
might  go  much  further  back,  as  Darwin  does  in  a  let- 
ter to  Sir  Charles  Lyell :  "  Plato,  Buffon,  my  grand- 
father, before  Lamarck,  and  others,  propounded  the 
obvious  view  that  if  species  were  not  created 
separately,  they  must  have  descended  from  other 
species."  ^  Robert  Chambers,  in  his  "  Vestiges  of 
Creation,"  had  done  something  to  popularize  the 
idea,  though  with  grace  and  facility  rather  than 
accuracy ;  while  Baden  Powell  had  argued  that  the 
"  Order  of  Nature,"  which  was  the  title  of  his 
book,  represented  an  unbroken  series  of  events 
linked  each  to  each  by  natural  causes.^  He  also 
bore  glad  witness  to  the  significance  of  Darwin's 
work  when  the  "  Origin "  appeared.  The  central 
thought  of  Herbert  Spencer's  evolutionary  philoso- 
phy had  already  been  foreshadowed  in  his  "  Social 
Statics"  and  "Principles  of  Psychology,"  though 
the  formal  announcement  in  the  "First  Principles" 
waited  until  1862. 

Under  these  circumstances  of  preparation  Darwin 
in  1859,  all  unconscious  of  the  magnitude  of  im- 
pending results,  put  his  ploughshare  into  the  field. 
The  figure  is  too  mild,  although  admirably  suited 

*  Life  and  Letters  of  Charles  Darwin,  vol.  ii,  pp.  198-199. 

2  This  book  was  published  in  the  same  year  with  the  Origin  of 
Species ;  but  its  main  positions  had  been  announced  in  the  writer's 
earlier  works,  especially  in  the  Plurality  of  Worlds  (1856). 


406  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

to  the  temper  of  the  man.  One  might  perhaps 
better  say  that  he  fired  a  train  which  was  eventu- 
ally to  explode  a  multitude  of  cherished  conven- 
tions in  the  world  of  thought.  There  is  indeed  a 
trace  of  Fate's  irony  in  the  fact  that  this  man, 
who  spent  a  lifetime  of  quiet  toil  in  disclosing  Na- 
ture's orderly  consecutiveness,  should  have  proved, 
in  spite  of  himself,  to  be  an  agent  of  catastrophe. 
The  intervening  half-century  has  gone  far  toward 
silencing  the  turmoil.  Its  dust  has  settled  and  men 
discover,  some  to  their  comfort  and  others  with 
chagrin,  that  the  stars  still  shine  and  the  pillars 
of  earth  are  unshaken ;  but  at  the  time  and  for 
long  afterward  many  who  were  neither  bigots  nor 
fanatics  feared  that  their  dearest  possessions  were 
threatened.  Some  found  a  momentary  satisfaction 
in  the  thought  that  a  moral  law  which  had  proved 
too  strait  for  their  convenience  was  likely  to  go 
down  in  the  confusion;  others  of  honester  and  more 
constructive  habit  felt  or  tried  to  feel  the  elation  of 
those  who  find  themselves  upon  the  site  of  an  unbuilt 
city  or  the  shore  of  a  rich  but  unmapped  land. 

Darwin  himself  can  scarcely  be  numbered  in  any 
one  of  the  three  groups.  He  had  lived  with  his 
theory  too  long  and  intimately  to  be  fearful  of  its 
consequences  upon  the  one  hand,  or  greatly  elated 
over  its  prospects  upon  the  other.  His  was  a  singu- 
larly gracious  as  well  as  judicial  temper.  None  knew 
the  objections  better ;  none  more  frankly  admitted 
the  necessary  limitations  of  the  argument  or  the 


DARWIN  AND   HIS   PLOUGHSHARE  407 

gaps  in  its  completeness ;  none  consented  to  be  in- 
structed with  a  more  exquisite  humility ;  and  none 
could  be  less  dogmatic  in  stating,  or  declining  to 
state,  the  philosophical  and  religious  implications 
of  his  views.  The  Saints  of  Science  are  commonly 
supposed  to  be  but  a  meagre  company ;  yet  while  the 
old  prophetic  test  of  "  doing  justly,  loving  mercy, 
and  walking  humbly  with  God"  has  application, 
this  man  would  seem  to  be  worthy  of  a  place  among 
that  or  any  other  chorus  of  the  Blessed.  He  has  con- 
fessed that  absorption  in  scientific  studies  robbed 
him,  as  life  went  on,  of  his  natural  taste  for  music 
and  poetry ;  until  the  time  came  when  he  could 
scarce  read  even  Shakespeare  without  effort.  Since 
he  was  a  preeminently  truthful  witness,  we  are  forced 
to  take  his  word  for  it,  though  not  without  a  pro- 
test ag^ainst  the  ungrenerous  use  which  has  often  been 
made  of  the  confession.  Darwin's  self-depreciation 
must  have  seemed  insincere  in  a  less  humble  and 
candid  man.  As  it  is,  we  can  only  smile  when  we 
find  him  writing  to  a  friend  that  facts  compel  him  to 
conclude  that  his  brain  was  never  formed  for  much 
thinking,^  and  not  long  before  his  death,  a  similar 
note  recurs  in  his  reference  to  a  recent  journey 
through  the  Lake  Country.  "  The  scenery  gave  me 
more  pleasure  than  I  thought  my  soul,  or  whatever 
remains  of  it,  was  capable  of  feeling."  ^  The  simple 

1  Letter  to  W.  D.  Fox,  Life  and   Letters,  vol.  i,  p.  506.    The 
reference  is  apparently  to  quantity  rather  than  quality  of  thought, 
a  Life  and  Letters  of  G.  J.  Romanes,  p.  103. 


408  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

fact  seems  to  be  that  Darwin  was  no  absolute  ex- 
ception to  the  rule  that  one's  — 

nature  is  subdued 
To  what  it  works  in,  like  the  dyer's  hand. 

He  unquestionably  sacrificed  much  to  his  intense 
application  to  one  line  of  study ;  and  his  conclusion 
that  it  would  have  been  better  for  him  had  he  kept 
up  a  daily  acquaintance  with  music  and  poetry,  is 
doubtless  a  sound  one ;  but  to  make  much  of  these 
confessions,  or  to  infer  from  them  that  his  nature 
shrank  or  grew  meagre  as  time  went  on,  would  be 
as  grossly  unjust  as  the  attempt  which  has  some- 
times been  made  to  belittle  Komanes's  later  experi- 
ence by  the  false  assertion  that  his  mind  became 
impaired. 

It  is  true,  however,  that  Darwin  himself  avoided 
so  far  as  possible  all  discussion  of  philosophy  and 
metaphysics ;  only  by  force,  as  it  were,  could  he  be 
dragged  into  correspondence  upon  the  religious 
bearings  of  his  theories.  Yet  he  clearly  foresaw  that 
religion  would  of  necessity  be  involved  in  the  popu- 
lar approach  to  his  positions.  He  was  unwilling  to 
present  the  substance  of  the  "  Origin  of  Species  " 
at  the  meeting  of  a  learned  society,  because  of  his 
confidence  that  in  the  discussion  which  must  follow 
the  subject  of  religion  would  be  brought  in^;  and 
in  planning  with  Lyell  for  the  book's  publication 
he  frankly  raised  the  question   of  its  "unortho- 

1  Life  and  Letters,  vol.  i,  p.  499. 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  409 

doxy."*  His  foresight  was  abundantly  justified. 
Stevenson  somewhere  remarks,  in  speaking  of  Talk 
and  Talkers,  that  "  you  can  keep  no  men  long,  nor 
Scotchmen  at  all,  off  moral  or  theological  discus- 
sion." Darwin  himself  had  pondered  upon  the  deri- 
vation of  species  and  natural  selection  long  enough 
to  perceive  that,  in  themselves  considered,  they 
were  no  more  subversive  of  religious  faith  than  were 
the  "  Principles  "  of  Lyell,  to  which  believers  had 
in  some  measure  accommodated  themselves;  and 
he  would  gladly  have  postponed  this  phase  of  the 
discussion.  But  the  majority  of  his  readers  and  the 
mass  of  those  who  gained  their  knowledge  of  his 
theories  at  second  hand  were  all  as  Scotchmen  in 
the  matter.  They  would  not  be  put  off.  When, 
at  the  famous  Oxford  meeting  of  the  British  As- 
sociation, Bishop  Wilberforce  arraigned  the  new 
theory  with  characteristic  assurance  and  rudeness, 
Huxley  had  some  right  to  his  exultant  cry,  "The 
Lord  hath  delivered  him  into  our  hand." 

Both  sides  saw  that  the  real  issue  before  the 
mass  of  thoughtful  people  was  a  religious  one. 
Many  professional  students  of  science,  less  com- 
bative by  nature  than  Huxley,  doubtless  felt  deep 
regret  that  the  matter  must  be  thus  complicated. 
It  was,  they  claimed,  fundamentally  a  problem  in 
biological  method ;  a  matter  for  unbiassed  observa- 
tion, experiment,  and  generalization;  every  ques- 
tion of  a  philosophical  or  religious  nature  which 

*  Life  and  Letters^  vol.  i,  p.  507. 


410  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

arose  in  the  minds  of  investigators  or  expositors 
only  beclouded  the  issue  and  clogged  the  path  of 
progress.  Their  view  was  that  of  the  mere  pro- 
fessional man,  and  therefore  cramped  and  inade- 
quate. It  is  of  course  true  that  merely  as  a  theory, 
the  doctrine  which  the  "Origin  of  Species"  set 
forth  needed  the  service  of  a  candid  and  unbiassed 
biologist,  and  it  was  its  singular  good  fortune  to 
find  in  Darwin  a  student  of  this  type;  but  it  is  no 
less  true  that,  if  a  biological  theory  is  to  gain  gen- 
eral acceptance  and  exercise  a  universal  influence, 
it  must  show  its  importance  to  the  wider  interests 
of  men.  Biology  in  itself  considered  is  no  doubt 
a  fascinating  subject.  Its  conclusions  excite  a  rela- 
tively mild  interest  among  large  numbers  of  men. 
But  the  interest  is  generally  that  which  attaches 
to  curious  facts.  It  lacks  the  haunting  and  fruit- 
ful quality  which  belongs  to  far-reaching  philo- 
sophical principles.  Even  discoveries  like  those 
associated  with  the  names  of  Pasteur  or  Lister, 
which  bear  immediately  upon  the  preservation  of 
property  or  life,  excite  but  a  nine  days'  wonder, 
and  then  drop  quietly  into  their  places  in  the 
world  of  accepted  circumstance.  With  matters 
which  involve  origin  and  destiny  it  is  not  so. 
These  at  once  arouse  man's  deeper  interests; 
though  their  terms  be  physical,  they  are  felt  to 
involve  those  elements  in  his  being  which  he  calls 
personal,  ethical,  and  spiritual.  They  reach  down 
to  the  conduct  of  life  and  up  to  its  aspirations. 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  411 

Though  few  men  discuss  them  intelligibly,  and  in 
logically  correct  propositions,  many  argue  over 
them  and  are  subtly  influenced  in  life  by  the  con- 
clusions—  often  erroneous  enough — at  which  they 
arrive. 

The  debt  of  the  Darwinians  to  the  Bishop  of 
Oxford  is  only  less  than  that  to  Mr.  Huxley.  To 
argue,  as  Bishop  Wilberforce  did,  against  Natural 
Selection  and  the  Derivation  of  Species,  because 
the  man  who  accepted  these  theories  must  look 
back  to  a  monkey  as  his  grandfather,  was  mere 
pitiable  buffoonery;  and  yet,  under  the  rude  and 
unworthy  speech,  there  was  an  element  of  saving 
truth,  of  even  greater  importance  to  the  Darwin- 
ians than  to  their  adversaries.  The  mere  study  of 
variation,  emphasized  and  made  permanent  by 
Nature's  breeding,  until  a  new  variety  of  marked 
distinction  was  evolved  from  the  primitive  rock- 
pigeon,  must  have  excited  but  a  languid  interest 
in  the  world.  Rules  governing,  and  in  a  limited 
fashion  explaining,  these  variations,  might  have 
been  formulated  without  disturbing  the  public 
peace.  But  when  the  investigation  touched  man 
himself  and  seemed  to  involve  him  altogether, 
body  and  soul,  past  and  future  alike,  at  once 
there  was  widespread  concern.  All  the  time-hon- 
oured faiths  and  institutions  of  society  seemed 
threatened ;  the  most  sacred  instincts  of  the  heart 
were  in  danger  of  denial ;  and  as  a  result  the 
theories  of  Darwin  found  both  the  publicity  and 


412  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  criticism  which  they  deserved.  Darwin's  work 
was  great  enough  to  merit  and  profit  by  attack. 
It  is  of  course  to  be  regretted  that  the  attack 
should  so  often  have  been  petty  and  prejudiced; 
but  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  the  defence  and 
counter-attack  were  as  frequently  unworthy.  The 
orthodox  theologians  had  no  monopoly  of  dogma- 
tism; bell,  book,  and  candle  are  soldiers  of  for- 
tune, —  they  were  enlisted  in  this  controversy  as 
eagerly  upon  the  side  of  atheism  and  materialism 
as  they  had  ever  been  in  behalf  of  creation  by 
divine  fiat  in  six  solar  days.  ^  Scientists '  were  not 
wanting  who  stood  ready  to  excommunicate  all 
believers  in  religion  from  the  congregation  not 
merely  of  intelligent  but  of  sincere  men.^ 

The  real  leaders  in  the  controversy  were  of  larger 
calibre  and  higher  type.  Some,  like  Huxley,  Tyn- 
dall,  and  Spencer  were  confessed  ^  agnostics ' ;  others, 
like  Wallace,  Asa  Gray,  and  Agassiz,  not  only  re- 
cognized religion's  claims  but  believed  in  its  positive 
content.  Among  men  of  the  first  rank  outspoken 

*  It  is  with  much  surprise  and  some  genuine  pain  that  the  reader 
finds  this  note  recurring  persistently  in  so  learned  and  in  many 
ways  so  charming  a  book  as  Mr.  Benn's  recent  History  of  English 
Rationalism  in  the  Nineteenth  Century.  Mr.  Benn  is  perfectly  capa- 
ble of  presenting  views  or  facts  unfavourable  to  his  own  position, 
and  sometimes  does  so  with  admirable  fairness;  but  his  method  of 
dealing  with  great  names  like  those  of  Mill,  Darwin,  and  a  host 
of  others,  and  his  repeated  insinuations  that  their  caution  in  pro- 
mulgating unpopular  views  was  due  to  fear,  or  their  boldness  to 
the  security  of  assured  position  or  private  means,  are  in  a  tone 
worthy  of  Vivian. 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  413 

preachers  of  unbelief  like  Clifford  were  few ;  and 
one  cannot  but  wonder  whether  Clifford,  had  he 
lived,  could  have  maintained  his  attitude  of  mili- 
tant negation  through  middle  age.  But  this  is  true 
of  them  all,  —  that  it  was  their  position  with  refer- 
ence to  religion  which  gave  them  their  widest  if 
not  always  their  most  intelligent  public.  The  circle 
of  readers  who  really  grasped  Tyndall's  argument 
in  the  Belfast  Address  was  small  indeed  in  com- 
parison with  the  multitude  who  were  impressed  by 
what  they  supposed  to  be  its  attack  upon  rehgion. 
The  really  competent  students  of  Darwin's  "De- 
scent of  Man  "  were  but  a  handful  in  contrast  with 
those  who  grieved  with  Miss  Frances  Power  Cobbe 
over  his  theory  of  the  origin  of  Conscience.  Hux- 
ley's remark  upon  the  "  Origin  of  Species  "  holds 
true  of  the  whole  literature  to  which  it  gave  rise. 
''  The  immense  popularity  which  the  ^  Origin '  at 
once  acquired  was  no  doubt  largely  due  to  its  many 
points  of  contact  with  philosophical  and  theological 
questions  in  which  every  intelligent  man  feels  a 
profound  interest."  ^ 

Mr.  Huxley's  own  fate  is  a  case  in  point.  Though 
a  biologist  of  great  attainments,  he  is  known  as  a 
theologian  to  multitudes  who  would  be  puzzled  to 
state  a  single  contribution  which  he  made  to  pure 
science.  They  know  him  as  the  promulgator  of  the 
hard-used  word  '  agnostic ' ;  they  remember  his  col- 
loquy with  Bishop  Wilberforce;  they  have  watched 

»  T.  H.  Huxley,  Darwiniana,  p.  286. 


414  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

his  truculent  joy  in  slaying  once  more  the  much- 
enduring  Gadarene  swine;  and  in  it  all  they  have 
seen  a  theological  controversialist  of  the  keenest 
type,  —  one  of  the  most  bumptious  and  at  the  same 
time  fascinating  of  preachers.  It  was  a  true  instinct 
which  led  him  to  preach  and  print  his  "  Lay  Ser- 
mons." On  the  other  hand  the  opposition  of  so 
eager  and  receptive  a  mind  as  that  of  Agassiz  to 
the  Darwinian  hypothesis  has  commonly  been  as- 
cribed to  its  preoccupation  with  certain  religious 
views.  There  is  truth  in  the  claim,  and  one  of  Ag- 
assiz's  most  brilliant  and  influential  pupils,  himself 
an  ardent  Darwinian,  has  gone  so  far  as  to  ascribe 
especial  honour  to  his  master  upon  exactly  this 
ground.  His  reasoning  is  that  the  religious  convic- 
tions of  Agassiz  were  something  far  more  than  pre- 
judices in  favour  of  dogma,  as  they  were  certainly 
something  higher  than  superstition.  Religion  was 
a  great  experience  into  which  years  of  his  life  had 
gone.  The  fundamental  articles  in  it  had  proved 
their  value  by  practical  experiment.  The  new  view 
seemed  to  be  so  at  variance  with  these  articles  that 
he  could  not  admit  its  validity.*  There  has  been  a 
considerable  tendency  to  deride  such  an  attitude 
as  timid  and  unscientific ;  and  a  corresponding  de- 
mand upon  men  to  enroll  themselves  beneath  the 
banner  of  '  agnosticism '  or  else  be  branded  as  reac- 
tionaries. Agnosticism  became  a  part  of  what  Dr. 

*  Le  Conte,  Evolviion  and  its  Relation  to  Religious  Thought,  p.  45, 
2d  edition. 


DARWIN   AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  415 

Johnson  used  to  call  the  "clamour  of  the  time/' 
and  spoke  with  the  authority  of  fashion.  The 
fashion  is  likely,  however,  to  prove  a  passing  one. 
Huxley's  adjective  ^agnostic'  has  its  useful  place, 
but  it  is  too  feeble  and  complexionless  a  term  for 
the  designation  of  thoughtful  men.  No  word  the 
most  significant  syllable  in  which  is  negative  can 
hold  the  allegiance  of  the  wise  for  very  long.  ^  Al- 
pha privative '  may  serve  as  motto  for  the  protest  of 
a  decade ;  it  can  scarcely  lead  the  progress  of  a  cen- 
tury. "Do  not  let  what  you  do  know  be  overthrown 
by  what  you  do  not  know,"  is  an  old  and  well-ap- 
proved dictum  of  experience,  to  which  the  gospel 
of  '  agnosticism '  ran  counter.  It  was  a  counsel  of 
negation,  and  common  sense  could  not  remain  sub- 
ject to  it.  Religion  stood  for  something  so  real  and 
vital  that  men  had  been  found  to  live  by  it  and  to 
die  for  it  in  every  generation.  They  could  not  dis- 
miss it  at  the  word  of  a  scientific  dogmatist;  nor 
could  they  rest  in  presence  of  a  theory  presented 
even  with  the  sweet  reasonableness  of  Darwin's 
until  its  philosophical  and  religious  implications 
had  been  examined. 

The  hesitation  which  men  showed  in  presence  of 
Darwin's  conclusions  was  therefore  not  altogether 
unreasonable.  Two  things  were  necessary  before 
Evolution  could  do  its  needed  work.  One  was  that 
its  evidences  should  be  recanvassed  and  its  argu- 
ments restated  under  the  stress  of  acute  and  search- 
ing criticism ;  the  other  that  time  should  be  given 


416  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

for  men  to  see  what  was  and  what  was  not  implied 
in  its  acceptance. 

The  insistance  of  religious  writers  upon  this  latter 
point  was  in  itself  right.  Their  manner  of  insisting 
was  often  altogether  wrong.  Sometimes  they  were 
timid,  as  though  the  evolutionist  might  undermine 
the  foundations  of  faith  by  catching  God  in  self- 
contradiction  ;  sometimes  bold  with  an  uncharitable 
assumption  that  the  new  theories  were  committed  to 
atheism  and  materialism.  The  timidity  and  the  bold- 
ness were  alike  unprofitable  and  baseless.  "  The 
doctrine  of  Evolution,  therefore,  does  not  even  come 
into  contact  with  Theism,  considered  as  a  philo- 
sophical doctrine.  That  with  which  it  does  collide  is 
the  conception  of  creation,  which  theological  specu- 
lators have  based  upon  .  .  .  the  opening  of  the 
Book  of  Genesis."  Such  is  Mr.  Huxley's  claim  as 
set  forth  in  the  chapter  which  he  contributed  to 
Darwin's  "  Life." ' 

Quite  as  baseless  was  the  assertion  that  Evolution 
was  but  another  name  for  ^  materialism,'  if  indeed 
that  term  have  any  intelligible  meaning.  Here  again 
we  may  call  Darwin  and  Huxley  to  witness.  The 
reader  will  remember  the  former's  searching  ques- 
tions to  Romanes  upon  the  publication  of  the  "  Can- 
did Examination."  The  latter  is  even  more  specific. 
He  claims  that,  while  the  old  doctrine  of  design  and 
purpose  in  nature  is  quite  inadequate,  there  is  a 
wider  teleology  which  is  not  antagonized  by  the  doc- 
»  Vol.  i,  p.  556. 


DARWIN  AND  HIS   PLOUGHSHARE  417 

trine  of  Evolution  but  is  actually  based  upon  its 
fundamental  proposition/  He  would  substitute  the 
word  '  powers '  for  '  forces  '  in  speaking  of  the  po- 
tency seemingly  resident  in  the  molecules,  and  in- 
sists that  '  matter '  and  ^  spirit '  are  but  names  for 
the  ultimate  cause  of  the  things  we  see.^ 

Nor  has  any  one  presented  more  forcibly  than 
Huxley  himself  the  inevitable  suspicion  with  which 
thoughtful  men  saw  the  first  advances  of  the  theory 
of  development  to  its  place  of  dominance.  Its  ap- 
parent conclusions,  he  said  in  1868,  weigh  — 

"  like  a  nightmare,  I  believe,  upon  many  of  the  best 
minds  of  these  days.  They  watch  what  they  con- 
ceive to  be  the  progress  of  materialism,  in  such  fear 
and  powerless  anger  as  a  savage  feels,  when,  during 
an  eclipse,  the  great  shadow  creeps  over  the  face  of 
the  sun.  The  advancing  tide  of  matter  threatens  to 
drown  their  souls ;  the  tightening  grasp  of  law  im- 
pedes their  freedom ;  they  are  alarmed  lest  man's 
moral  nature  be  debased  by  the  increase  of  his  wis- 
dom."^ 

There  is  a  common  notion  that  Huxley  himself 
felt  this  fear  to  be  justified.  He  showed  so  much  of 
the  joy  of  conflict  in  argument  with  his  fellow  the- 
ologians of  more  conservative  habit,  as  to  lead  care- 
less readers  to  the  conclusion  that  he  was  a  '  mate- 
riahst,'  and  a  denier  of  all  spiritual  function  or  life. 

^  Life  and  Letters  of  Charles  Darwin  (chapter  by  Professor  Hux- 
ley), vol.  i,  pp.  554-555. 

2  Lay  Sermons,  Addresses f  and  Reviews ^  p.  143. 

3  Ibid.,  pp.  142-143. 


418  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

This  is  far  from  the  truth.  His  disclaimer  of  ^  ma- 
terialism' was  emphatic.  His  attitude  upon  the 
great  question  of  man's  freedom  and  responsibility 
may  again  be  best  suggested  by  his  own  words. 

"  Philosophers  gird  themselves  for  battle  upon  the 
last  and  greatest  of  all  speculative  problems :  Does 
human  nature  possess  any  free,  volitional,  or  truly 
anthropomorphic  element,  or  is  it  only  the  cunning- 
est  of  all  Nature's  clocks  ?  Some,  among  whom  I 
count  myself,  think  that  the  battle  will  forever  re- 
main a  drawn  one,  and  that,  for  all  practical  pur- 
poses, this  result  is  as  good  as  anthropomorphism 
winning  the  day." 


•>  1 


In  another  connection  he  speaks  of  the  "  definite 
order  of  the  Universe  —  which  is  embodied  in  what 
are  called,  by  an  unhappy  metaphor,  the  laws  of 
Nature."^ 

There  is  a  deep  significance  in  this  recognition  of 
the  fact  that  language  does  not  cease  to  be  meta- 
phorical and  figurative  when  summoned  to  the  ser- 
vice of  science.  The  "  laws  of  Nature  "  are  but  meta- 
phorical and  figurative  statements  after  all,  as  really, 
even  though  not  so  largely,  anthropomorphic  as  any 
principle  of  the  theologian.  The  mind  and  the  ex- 
perience of  man  is  still  the  measure  of  the  world. 
He  cannot  be  forbidden  to  speculate  in  what  he 
terms  the  realm  of  the  spirit  without  suffering  from 
limitation  in  the  world  of  so-called  science ;  and 

»  Lay  Sermonst  «  The  Scientific  Aspect  of  Positivism,"  p.  164. 
2  if,id,^  p.  17, 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  419 

science  in  its  turn  will  always  be  indebted,  for  its 
introduction  to  multitudes  of  men,  to  those  teachers 
who  insist  upon  discussing  its  principles  in  their  re- 
lations to  man's  present  conduct  and  future  destiny. 
The  great  popularizers  of  science  are  always  in  some 
degree  theologians.  No  Darwinians  in  America  have 
had  a  wider  or  more  respectful  hearing  than  Asa 
Gray,  Joseph  Le  Conte,  and  John  Fiske.  All  dealt 
constructively  with  the  relation  between  the  new 
theories  and  the  genuineness  of  man's  religious 
needs.  Scientists,  of  the  sort  who  insist  upon  their 
right  to  a  capital  S,  are  inclined  to  resent  the  inclu- 
sion of  the  late  Professor  Drummond  in  their  com- 
pany. They  prefer  that  he  be  remembered  in  the 
words  of  the  Saturday  Reviewer  as  one  "  who  af- 
fected checked  tweeds  and  the  society  of  Lord  Aber* 
deen."  The  fact  remains,  however,  that  Drummond 
was  a  keenly  intelHgent  student  of  science ;  that  he 
was  gifted  with  unusual  powers  of  exposition ;  that 
he  had  an  almost  unique  experience  of  the  ethical 
and  spiritual  struggle  which,  during  his  short  career, 
marked  the  university  life  of  both  Britain  and  Amer- 
ica; and  that  he  brought  to  his  work  as  a  popular 
teacher  and  preacher  very  genuine  convictions  of 
the  significance  of  modern  scientific  theories  upon 
the  one  hand,  and  of  the  reality  of  religious  experi- 
ence upon  the  other.  "  Natural  Law  in  the  Spiritual 
World"  and  the  "Ascent  of  Man"  may  continue 
to  be  treated  rather  cavalierly  by  professional  stu- 
dents of  science ;  none  the  less  these  volumes,  with 


420  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

such  books  as  Professor  Fiske's  "  Nature  of  God  '* 
and  "  Destiny  of  Man,"  and  Professor  Le  Conte's 
"Evolution  and  its  Relation  to  Religious  Thought," 
have  done  an  incalculable  service  in  familiarizing 
men  with  the  methods  and  the  general  conclusions 
of  modern  science  in  such  a  way  as  to  connect  these 
discoveries  rationally  with  the  great  underlying  ex , 
periences  of  life.  The  gain  to  the  cause  of  rehgion 
itself  has  been  equally  obvious.  A  thoughtful  writer 
has  recently  observed  that  "  the  only  thing  that  is 
fatal  to  a  religion  is  the  conviction  that  it  has  no 
basis  in  the  nature  of  things."  *  The  fear  which  ar- 
rayed some  religious  men  against  the  new  theories 
was  largely  due  to  a  suspicion  that  religion  was 
threatened  with  precisely  this  divorce.  Time  has 
gone  far  to  reassure  all  except  those  who  fancy  re- 
ligion to  be  immune  from  the  necessities  of  change 
and  growth. 

Under  the  changed  conditions  induced  by  scien- 
tific thought  men  have  refined  and  enlarged  their 
idea  of  God.  They  thought  of  Him  once  as  a 
Wonder-worker,  or  Creator-by-fiat,  and  they  were 
jealous  for  Him  as  one  might  be  jealous  for  the  skill 
and  mysterious  resource  of  a  sleight-of-hand  per- 
former. They  feared  lest  God  might  be  '  found  out.' 
The  last  half-century  has  taught  them  that  the  love 
of  rational  processes  and  a  determination  to  use  the 
slow  methods  of  growth  are  divine  attributes  wor- 
thier of  adoration  than  any  mere  ability  to  amaze 

*  Prof.  John  Watson,  Philosophical  Basis  of  Religion^  p.  174. 


DARWIN  AND  HIS  PLOUGHSHARE  421 

and  mystify.  So  far  from  finding  God  out,  the  re- 
search of  the  student  has  tended  rather  to  widen  the 
horizon  of  mystery ;  but  to  assure  him  at  the  same 
time  that  wherever  he  goes  along  the  well-worn  paths 
of  the  known,  or  out  upon  his  voyages  of  adventure 
into  the  unknown,  he  may  confidently  expect  to  find 
Creative  Power  at  work  in  orderly  and  reasonable 
fashion. 

This  assurance  has  reacted  upon  man's  estimate 
of  himself  in  the  interests  of  a  higher  and  saner  faith. 
The  discovery  that  the  earth  was  among  the  most 
insignificant  of  planets  tended  for  a  time  to  make 
man  the  object  of  his  own  contempt.  It  seemed  the 
height  of  presumption  that  he,  who  represented  but 
a  pinch  of  cosmic  dust,  able  to  retain  corporeal  shape 
and  unity  amid  the  flux  of  circumstance  for  a  few 
brief  days,  should  aspire  to  knowledge  and  domin- 
ion, or  should  lay  claim  to  a  destiny.  Yet  the  very 
century  which  accentuated  man's  Httleness  at  the 
same  time  demonstrated  the  range  of  his  powers. 
His  mastery  of  physical  nature  during  the  last  hun- 
dred years  will  long  serve  to  distinguish  that  epoch. 
Its  bridging,  mining,  and  tunnelling,  its  reduction 
of  the  sea  to  a  universal  highway  which  men  can 
travel  with  assurance  and  in  safety,  its  harnessing 
of  steam  and  its  annihilation  of  time  and  space 
through  its  very  partial  acquaintance  with  electricity, 
are  indubitable  history.  The  inevitable  conclusion 
is  being  borne  in  upon  him  that  he  will  find  no  re- 
gion of  the  Universe  foreign  to  his  reason.  Whether 


422  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

he  continue  to  dwell  in  this  little  planet,  or  be  trans- 
planted to  some  more  dignified  abode,  the  world 
about  him  is  likely  to  see  itself  still  reflected  in  his 
mind.  Whatever  the  Creative  Power  immanent  in 
the  world  may  be.  His  methods  of  working  appear 
to  be  cognate  to  the  mind  of  man.  They  often  puz- 
zle men  by  their  greatness;  they  always  yield  to  the 
mind's  attack,  however,  when  a  sufficient  founda- 
tion of  experience  has  been  laid  for  it  to  stand  upon. 
This  assurance  which  man  has  won  out  of  the 
adventure  of  science  emboldens  him  to  renew  cer- 
tain old  claims  upon  the  Universe.  He  feels  that  he 
has  a  right  to  his  own  integrity ;  that  is,  to  a  certain 
wholeness  of  life  and  experience  for  which  three  score 
and  ten  years  do  not  suffice.  Having  once  tasted 
food  for  mind  and  soul  he  is  as  little  disposed  as  was 
Oliver  Twist  to  be  put  off  with  a  single  helping. 
Though  the  beadles  of  science  and  religion  stare, 
and  conventional  voices  cry  out  upon  his  audacity, 
he  will,  often  no  doubt  awkwardly  enough,  insist 
that  he  was  made  for  life  instead  of  death,  for  faith 
instead  of  unbelief,  for  conquest  rather  than  defeat. 
He  will  refuse  to  be  put  to  confusion  by  circumstance. 
He  will  reiterate  as  his  Magna  Charta  the  passage 
in  Hebrew  tradition  which  bids  him  "  replenish  the 
earth  and  subdue  it "  ;  and  persist  in  regarding  his 
claim  to  the  venture  of  religion  as  strengthened 
rather  than  invalidated  by  the  teaching  of  science. 


CHAPTER    Xm 

THE   DOUBTERS    AND   THE    MYSTICS 

It  18  said  that  preachers  are  most  inclined  toward 
themes  of  loss  and  sorrow  in  their  youth.  Then, 
more  than  in  later  years,  they  aspire  to  set  forth 
the  contradictions  and  uncertainties  of  life,  and  to 
bring  mourners  into  vital  touch  with  springs  of 
comfort.  In  this  attempt  they  sometimes  illustrate 
one  of  the  very  contradictions  that  oppress  them, 
as  out  of  their  seemingly  unharassed  experience 
they  essay  to  deal  with  deep  and  harrowing  things. 
The  incongruity,  humourous  as  it  often  seems,  is, 
however,  more  apparent  than  real.  Many  men  who 
have  had  a  full  share  of  danger  and  defeat  may  be 
found  to  confess  that  their  days  of  deepest  anxi- 
ety came  in  the  relatively  sheltered  and  outwardly 
placid  period  of  youth.  The  fears  of  childhood  are 
often  unique  in  their  intensity ;  its  burdens  heavier 
than  those  of  later  life ;  its  loneliness  more  desolat- 
ing. Nor  is  the  reason  far  to  seek.  It  is  the  intel- 
ligent child  who  feels  most  keenly  his  inadequacy 
to  circumstance,  and  it  is  the  youth  who  is  most 
conscious  of  the  uniqueness  of  experience.  Later 
on  the  man  learns  how  great  a  store  of  resources 
and  compensations  life  may  furnish ;  and  he  per- 


424  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ceives  at  the  same  time  that  the  problems  which 
baffle  him  are  the  problems  of  every  age,  his  bur- 
dens are  those  under  which  other  men  have  stas*- 
gered,  and  his  path,  however  rugged  and  lonely, 
yet  proves  to  be  — 

Worn  of  frequent  feet. 

The  difficult  situations  of  youth  bode  irrevocable 
disaster;  those  of  maturity,  with  its  more  philoso- 
phic mind,  as  often  whisper  between  their  threats 
the  old  Yirgilian  solace,  "Perhaps  even  these  things 
it  will  some  day  be  helpful  to  remember."  Children 
within  speaking  distance  of  their  parents  still  some- 
times fear  the  dark ;  and  youth,  with  years  of 
goodly  life  before  it,  has  as  naturally  and  as  per- 
versely sung  of  death,  parting,  and  faith's  eclipse. 
It  is  a  part,  one  suspects,  of  that  revulsion  of  feel- 
ing which  all  men  know  who  try  their  'prentice 
hand  at  a  new  trade,  —  even  the  trade  of  living, — 
only  to  find  the  easy  tricks  of  it  transformed  into 
vexations  at  the  touch  of  their  inexperience. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  however,  the  fact  remains  that 
the  most  haunting  songs  of  doubt  and  disillusion 
have  been  sung  by  men  well  under  forty.  Clough 
and  Matthew  Arnold  in  their  different  styles  are 
eminent  illustrations  of  what  I  mean.  One  cannot 
pass  to  a  consideration  of  their  work  and  the  sources 
of  their  influence,  however,  without  regret  that  lack 
of  space  excludes  a  group  of  half-forgotten  poets, 
like  the  Chartist,  Ernest  Jones,  whose  "  Songs  of 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  IVIYSTICS  425' 

Democracy  "  deserve  a  place  beside,  if  not  above, 
Elliott's  "Corn-law  Rhymes";  Charles  Mackay, 
whose  simplicity  still  retains  some  power  of  real 
refreshment ;  the  irreproachable  Tupper,  with  his 
sure  faith  in  the  popular  appetite  for  platitude,  and 
his  facility  in  feeding  it;  and  "Festus"  Bailey. 
The  last  named  antedated,  as  he  outlived,  his  fel- 
lows, and  still  advances  claims  to  the  notice  of  pos- 
terity. In  a  recent  critical  notice  Mr.  James  Doug- 
las has  collected  a  considerable  number  of  passages 
from  "  Festus,"  which  certainly  help  to  bolster  his 
enthusiastic  praise  of  the  poem. 

And  age  but  presses  with  a  halo's  weight, 

may  be  admitted  to  be  a  worthy  line,  which  Mr. 
Douglas  has  succeeded  in  matching  with  a  fair  ar- 
ray of  peers.  Yet  "  Festus "  as  it  has  come  down 
to  us,  expanded  by  numerous  additions,  fattened, 
as  it  were,  upon  the  choicer  morsels  of  younger 
and  less  successful  brethren,  is  likely  to  remain  an 
essentially  unreadable  poem.  There  are  fine  Hues ; 
the  poetic  adventure  essayed  is  inspiring;  the  style 
is  often  worthy  the  attempt;  —  still  the  thing  is 
dreary.  The  reader  finds  himself  wondering  at  the 
reason  for  twelve  English  and  thirty  American  edi- 
tions ;  and  is  driven  to  seek  his  answer  in  the  fact 
that  Bailey  dealt  in  a  large,  free,  and  forceful  way 
with  the  perennial  theme  of  man's  origin,  destiny, 
and  accountability  to  God.  A  comparison  with 
Milton   is   inevitable  —  and  of   course  disastrous. 


426  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  "  DeviFs  Sermon "  in  Book  Five  reminds  the 
reader  of  the  address  of  Satan  to  Beelzebub ;  but  it 
is  Satan  modernized,  belittled,  and  robbed  of  his 
steadfast  philosophy  of  rebellion. 

Think  ye  your  souls  are  worth  nothing  to  God  ? 
Are  they  so  small  ?  What  can  be  great  with  God  ? 
The  sun  and  moon  he  wears  on  either  arm, 
Seals  of  his  sovereignty. 

There  is  good  reasoning  —  by  suggestion  —  here; 
the  metaphor  is  bold  and  fine,  after  a  barbaric  sort ; 
but  the  design  as  a  whole  lacks  Milton's  large  epic 
quality  as  completely  as  its  expression  misses  the 
majesty  of  Miltonic  blank  verse.  "Festus"  pro- 
claimed a  goodly  number  of  little  heresies  —  at  least 
they  were  thought  to  be  heresies  in  1840  —  out  of 
which  many  readers  doubtless  snatched  a  fearful 
joy;  and  it  set  forth  a  genuine  evangel,  defined 
by  the  author  himself  as  a  "  belief  in  the  benignant 
providence  of  God,  in  the  immortality  of  the  soul, 
in  the  harmonized  gospel  of  faith  and  reason  com- 
bined, and  in  the  just,  discriminative,  and  equitable 
judgement  of  the  spirit  after  death  by  Deity."  * 

It  was  the  possibility  of  such  truth  as  this  that 
haunted  Clough.  In  some  respects  he  seems  to  me 
to  embody  uniquely  the  higher  traits  of  English 
character.  The  late  R.  H.  Hutton  was  insistent  upon 
his  essential  kinship  to  Chaucer;  and  Clough  has 
indeed  much  of   Chaucer's   tolerant,  humourous, 

^  Quoted  by  J.  H.  Brown  in  Miles's  Poets  and  Poetry  of  the  Cen- 
tury, p.  474. 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  427 

brotherly  outlook  upon  the  works  and  ways  of  men. 
But  almost  as  good  a  case  could  be  made  out  for 
his  spiritual  relationship  to  Bunyan  as  the  inspired 
Tinker  uncovers  his  soul  in  "  Grace  Abounding." 
Professor  James,  in  his  recent  lectures  upon  "  Prag- 
matism," would  divide  his  fellow-men  into  two 
groups  according  to  their  possession  of  a  ^  tough '  or 
'  tender '  conscience.  The  division  is  at  once  sugges- 
tive and  unsatisfying;  but  granting  its  vaHdity,  both 
Bunyan  and  Clough  must  find  place,  side  by  side, 
among  the  men  of  not  merely  sensitive  but  hyper- 
sensitive conscience.  Both  possessed  wholesome  na- 
tures. Both  were  humane  in  the  Chaucerian  sense. 
But  Bunyan,  convicted  of  sin,  found  himself  under 
necessity  of  bringing  each  commonest  affair  of  life 
to  the  test  of  Sinai  with  its  thunders.  God's  frown 
darkened  the  ground  where  he  played  tip-cat,  and 
the  lightnings  of  Heaven's  wrath  threatened  to 
course  down  the  very  bell-ropes  with  which  he 
loved  to  ring.  There  was  no  question  of  doubt  in 
the  modern  sense.  The  Seat  of  Authority  was  sure, 
and  he  lived  in  such  close  relation  to  it  as  gave  aw- 
ful import  to  the  minutest  incident  of  life.  If  ever 
a  man  stood  consciously  "  naked  and  opened  unto 
the  eyes  of  Him  with  whom  we  have  to  do,"  Bun- 
yan was  that  man. 

Nearly  two  hundred  years  had  elapsed  when 
Clough  found  himself  in  the  midst  of  another  period 
of  religious  unrest  no  less  momentous  than  that  of 
the  seventeenth  century.  The  difference  was  that, 


428  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

while  Bunyan  gave  a  singularly  responsive  con- 
science over  to  excess  of  belief,  Clough  lent  his  to 
excess  of  doubt.  In  matters  of  the  spirit,  Clough 
was  like  a  naturally  hearty  and  full-blooded  man 
who  should  become  so  convinced  of  the  septic  peril 
lurking  in  all  food  and  raiment  as  to  go  hungry  and 
cold.  At  times  he  was  filled  with  a  desire  to  proceed 
even  further,  and  there  are  some  utterances  which 
make  him  seem  like  a  counterpart  of  the  St.  Bar- 
tholomew in  Milan  Cathedral,  standing,  a  grewsome 
wonder  of  quivering  muscle  and  tendon,  flayed,  and 
with  his  skin  over  his  arm.  Yet  he  was  saved  from 
the  sentimentahty  of  Rousseau,  the  querulousness 
of  Heine,  and  the  self-pity  of  Amiel,  by  his  humour 
and  his  love  of  physical  exercise.  Since  it  was  his 
to  be  — 

brought  forth  and  rear*d  in  hoars 
Of  change,  alarm,  surprise,  — 

it  was  well  that  he  should  have  been  a  runner  and 
swimmer  of  distinction,  as  well  as  one  of  the  best 
goal-keepers  on  record ;  and  it  was  very  well  that  he 
should  have  had  an  eye  clear  and  sane  enough  to 
discern  the  whimsical  as  well  as  the  heart-rending 
incongruities  of  life.  The  note  of  spiritual  strain 
and  stress  reaching  to  the  point  of  agony  is  ever 
recurrent. 

To  spend  uncounted  years  of  pain, 
Again,  again,  and  yet  again. 
In  working  out  in  heart  and  brain 
The  problem  of  our  being  here ;  — 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  429 

this  was  the  occupation  of  no  small  part  of  his  life ; 
the  lines  may  almost  be  said  to  codify  his  strenuous 
creed  of  doubt.  But  it  was  not,  after  all,  the  ultimate 
and  really  determinative  thing  in  either  mind  or 
heart.  As  beyond  the  gods  of  Olympus  there  existed 
a  half-discerned  Fate  which  finally  overruled  them, 
so  behind  Clough's  doubt  and  self -questioning  there 
lay  an  instinctive  trust  in  the  veracity  and  sanity 
of  man's  experience.  Compelled  by  circumstance  to 
doubt,  he  yet  recognized  faith  to  be  the  soul's  nor- 
mal and  healthy  exercise.  It  is  not  well,  however, 
that  life's  great  problems  should  be  settled  tyran- 
nously  or  by  force.  He  felt  the  temptation  to  this 
solution,  and  asked,  — 

O  may  we  for  assurance'  sake, 
Some  arbitrary  judgement  take, 
And  wilfully  pronounce  it  clear, 
For  this  or  that  't  is  we  are  here  ? 

No,  we  assuredly  may  not ;  —  and  yet,  — 

When  all  is  thought  and  said, 
The  heart  still  overrules  the  head ; 
Still  what  we  hope  we  must  believe, 
And  what  is  given  us  receive ; 

Must  still  believe ;  for  still  we  hope 
That  in  a  world  of  larger  scope, 
What  here  is  faithfully  begun 
Will  be  completed,  not  undone. 

The  same  thought  was  uttered  with  great  beauty 
and  feeling  in  his  prayer  ^'  Qui  Laborat  Orat"  ;  it 


430  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

came  to  rather  daring  and  sarcastic  speech  in  his 
modern  version  of  the  Commandments ;  — 

Thou  shalt  not  kill ;  yet  needst  not  strive 
Officiously  to  keep  alive ; 

and  it  bloomed  into  such  humour  and  tenderness 
in  a  Httle  poem  entitled  "  The  Existence  of  God," 
as  to  give  it  an  almost  unique  place  in  our  litera- 
ture. 

"  There  is  no  God,"  the  wicked  saith, 
"  And  truly  it 's  a  blessing, 
For  what  He  might  have  done  with  us 
It 's  better  only  guessing." 


"  There  is  no  God,  or  if  there  is," 

The  tradesman  thinks,  "  't  were  funny 
If  He  should  take  it  ill  in  me 
To  make  a  little  money." 


But  country  folks  who  live  beneath 
The  shadow  of  the  steeple  ; 

The  parson  and  the  parson's  wife, 
And  mostly  married  people ; 

Youths  green  and  happy  in  first  love, 

So  thankful  for  illusion ; 
And  men  caught  out  in  what  the  world 

Calls  guilt,  in  first  confusion ; 

And  almost  every  one  when  age, 
Disease,  or  sorrows  strike  him. 

Inclines  to  think  there  is  a  God, 
Or  something  very  like  Him." 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  431 

With  the  same  "wide  and  luminous  view"  he 
surveys  the  life  pictured  in  his  long  poem  "The 
Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuolich";  to  judge  at  least 
from  so  much  of  it  as  the  intolerable  hexameters 
and  the  barbarous  title  permit  us  to  read. 

He  weDt ;  his  piping  took  a  troubled  soand 
Of  storms  that  rage  outside  our  happy  ground ; 
He  could  not  wait  their  passing,  he  is  dead. 

It  was  fitting  that  Clough  should  have  been  thus 
commemorated  by  Matthew  Arnold  in  his  noblest 
elegiac  poem,  "  Thyrsis  " ;  for  between  the  two  men 
there  was  not  only  a  warm  friendship  but  a  wide 
community  of  experience.  Both  have  been  jauntily 
numbered  among  '  unbelievers ' ;  yet  it  is  doubtful 
if  any  two  poets  of  their  century  better  illustrate 
the  vital  connection  between  literature  and  religion, 
or  bear  more  unimpeachable  testimony  to  the  fact 
that,  however  poetry  may  seem  to  regard  the  forms 
of  faith,  it  can  never  get  on  for  very  long  without 
faith's  essence.  No  candid  reader  of  their  writings 
is  likely  to  deny  that  rehgion  was  a  paramount 
concern  of  both  and  a  chief  source  of  inspiration 
in  their  work.  To  Clough  it  — 

Was  great  comfort  and  yet  greater  grief. 

There  was  something  almost  passionate  in  his  ad- 
herence to  the  themes  of  faith,  whether  for  affirma- 
tion or  denial.  Arnold  was  capable  of  more  marked 
detachment  of  manner,  especially  in  his  poetry. 
The  plaintive  note  is  frequent;  the  poet's  voice 


432  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

seems  thin,  and  his  complexion  touched  with  pallor. 
Yet  the  plaint  is  so  restrained  and  so  free  from 
exaggeration ;  it  is  voiced  with  such  admirable  art, 
and  with  such  genuine  poignancy,  as  to  give  to 
some  stanzas  place  among  the  most  haunting  verses 
in  our  language.  Unlike  Clough,  however,  Arnold 
was  able  to  wait  the  passing  of  the  mid-century 
storms.  It  is  true  that,  after  Clough' s  marriage  and 
settlement  in  a  drudging  public  office,  his  life  flowed 
on  so  serenely  as  to  give  promise  that  he  too  had 
at  last  found  harbour;  but  he  died  at  forty-three. 
Arnold  lived  to  sixty-five  and  did  the  greater  por- 
tion of  his  positive  work  in  prose  after  forty. 

In  many  respects  he  was  the  true  spiritual  son  of 
his  father.  Thomas  Arnold  had  little  lightness  of 
touch.  The  smarting  cuticle  of  erring  Rugby  boys 
and  the  famous  paper  on  "The  Oxford  Malignants" 
testified  to  his  policy  of  '  thorough '  alike  with  cane 
and  pen.  Yet  his  discipline  was  as  free  from  all 
taint  of  cruelty  as  was  his  scholarship  from  pedan- 
try. He  was  simply  a  good  and  exceedingly  able 
man  so  mightily  in  earnest  as  to  be  in  some  slight 
danger  of  cultivating  energy  for  its  own  sake.  His 
eldest  son,  as  often  happens,  swung  to  the  other 
extreme  in  manner,  though  he  never  forfeited  alle- 
giance to  the  ideals  of  his  childhood.  Indeed  in 
some  respects  he  may  be  said  to  have  supplied  the 
necessary  complement  to  his  father.  Arnold  pere 
would  have  contended  that  if  a  bush  were  to  be 
beaten  to  start  a  hare  it  should  be  done  seriously, 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  433 

and  with  a  zeal  which  it  was  no  affectation  to  call 
religious.  Arnold  fils  loved  to  say  that  he  found 
the  serious  people  of  his  day  "beating  the  bush 
with  deep  emotion,  but  never  starting  the  hare  "  at 
all;  and,  as  Mr.  Gosse  has  happily  remarked,  he 
made  the  discovery  of  the  hare  his  object/ 

It  was  all  done  so  blithely,  however,  that  multi- 
tudes of  serious  people  questioned  his  sincerity  of 
intent.  But  it  is  interesting  and  quite  germane  to 
our  present  purpose  to  observe  that  this  note  of 
blithesomeness  so  eminently  characteristic  of  his 
later  prose  is  almost  wholly  lacking  in  his  poetry. 
One  need  only  contrast  his  more  serious  prose  works 
like  "Culture  and  Anarchy,"  or  "Literature  and 
Dogma,"  with  the  Obermann  poems  to  see  at  a  glance 
what  is  meant;  while  the  fooling  of  "Friendship's 
Garland  "  is  among  the  most  excellent  in  the  lan- 
guage. He  loved  to  quote  his  critics  when  they 
thought  themselves  to  be  keenest  upon  him.  One 
ponderously  accused  him  of  lacking  "  a  philosophy 
with  coherent,  interdependent,  subordinate  and  de- 
rivative principles" — a  charge  which  the  object 
of  it  delightedly  admitted,  and  turned  gleefully  to 
his  own  purposes.  No  doubt  his  playfulness  and 
gift  of  irony  sometimes  carried  him  well  beyond 
the  lines  of  good  taste,  and  occasionally  over  the 
bounds  of  decency.  A  man  need  not  be  very  ortho- 
dox to  feel  the  gravity  of  his  offence  in  the  matter 

1  Illustrated  History  of  English  Literature,  Glarnett  and  Gosse, 
vol.  iv,  p.  307. 


434  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

of  the  "  Three  Lord  Shaf tesburys/'  for  instance  ; 
yet  the  lapses  were  mere  incidents  after  all  in  the 
exercise  of  a  very  great  and  rare  literary  gift. 

The  most  casual  reader  of  the  early  poetry  or  the 
later  prose  must  perceive  how  natural  was  Arnold's 
use  of  the  themes  and  language  of  religion.  At  least 
eight  of  the  fourteen  sonnets  included  in  his  collected 
poems  deal  with  religious  subjects ;  and  among  them 
"East  London"  is  perhaps  the  most  characteristic. 

'  T  was  August,  and  the  fierce  sun  overhead 
Smote  on  the  squalid  streets  of  Bethnal  Green, 
And  the  pale  weaver,  through  his  windows  seen 
In  Spitalfields,  look'd  thrice  dispirited.     _, 

I  met  a  preacher  there  I  knew,  and  said : 
"  111  and  o'erwork'd,  how  fare  you  in  this  scene  ?  "  — 
"  Bravely !  "  said  he ;  "  for  I  of  late  have  been 

Much  cheer'd  with  thoughts  of  Christ,  the  living  bread** 

O  human  soul !  as  long  as  thou  canst  so 
Set  up  a  mark  of  everlasting  light, 
Above  the  howling  senses'  ebb  and  flow, 

To  cheer  thee,  and  to  right  thee  if  thou  roam  — 
Not  with  lost  toil  thou  labourest  through  the  night ! 
Thou  mak'st  the  heaven  thou  hop'st  indeed  thy  home. 

Beside  such  verses  as  these  there  should  be  set 
the  well-known  stanzas  from  "  The  Grande  Char- 
treuse," "  Obermann,"  and  "  Obermann  Once  More," 
which  depict  faith's  eclipse ;  though  it  is  always  to 
be  remembered  that  some  of  the  saddest,  most 
haunting,  and  most  often  quoted  of  these  lines  are 
put  by  the  poet  into  the  mouth  of  the  author  of 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  435 

*^  Obermann  "  ;  they  do  not  profess  to  voice  his  own 
personal  views.  His  moods  no  doubt  reflected  them ; 
they  seemed  to  be  in  some  sense  an  echo  of  the 
doubting  mid-century  mind  whose  influence  the  poet 
felt  so  keenly ;  yet  it  would  be  a  grave  mistake  to 
fancy  that  even  in  the  most  negative  period  of  his 
poetry  Arnold  thought  of  himself  as  a  preacher  of 
negation. 

"  My  poems  represent,  on  the  whole,"  he  wrote  to 
his  mother  in  1869,  "  the  main  movement  of  mind 
of  the  last  quarter  of  a  century,  and  thus  they  will 
probably  have  their  day  as  people  become  conscious 
to  themselves  of  what  that  movement  of  mind  is, 
and  interested  in  the  literary  productions  which  re- 
flect it." ' 

The  next  generation  justified  his  prophecy.  It 
took  a  haK-morbid  satisfaction  in  thinking  of  itself 
as — 

Wandering  between  two  worlds,  one  dead, 
The  other  powerless  to  be  born. 

When  men  would  picture  to  one  another  the  change 
that  was  passing  upon  faith  they  naturally  had  re- 
course to  Arnold's  simile,  — 

Achilles  ponders  in  his  tent, 
The  kings  of  modern  thought  are  dumb ; 
Silent  they  are,  though  not  content, 
And  wait  to  see  the  future  come. 
They  have  the  grief  men  had  of  yore, 
But  they  contend  and  cry  no  more. 

»  LetterSf  vol.  ii,  p.  10 ;  June  5, 1869. 


436  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

It  is  but  partly  true,  since  the  "  kings  of  modern 
thought "  have  been  as  communicative,  nay,  some- 
times as  vociferous,  as  thinkers  of  an  elder  day  ever 
showed  themselves ;  not  least  so  when,  like  Carlyle, 
staggered  by  the  greatness  of  our  mortal  way,  they 
have  seen  fit  to  fill  volumes  with  their  cries  of  "  Si- 
lence ! "  Yet  after  all,  it  is  an  admirable  picture  of 
a  mood  which  most  thoughtful  people  have  known 
as  they  looked  out  upon  the  welter  of  new  experi- 
ence wherein,  during  the  last  fifty  years,  old  land- 
marks threatened  to  be  either  buried  or  swept  away 
forever.  This  same  prophet,  however,  saw  quite  as 
clearly  that  on  our  modern  journey  through  the  wil- 
derness the  true  leader  and  saviour  must  be  a  man 
of  faith. 

Servants  of  God !  —  or  sons 

Shall  I  not  call  you  ?  because 

Not  as  servants  ye  knew 

Your  Father's  innermost  mind, 

His,  who  unwillingly  sees 

One  of  his  little  ones  lost  — 

Yours  is  the  praise,  if  mankind 

Hath  not  as  yet  in  its  march 

Fainted,  and  fallen,  and  died  ! 

The  lines  are  taken  from  "  Rugby  Chapel,"  and 
might  be  matched  by  passages  from  his  letters,  to 
show  in  how  real  a  sense  Arnold  felt  himself  to 
be  his  father's  son.  Thomas  Arnold's  treatment  of 
verbal  inspiration  was  thought  by  many  to  be  quite 
as  revolutionary  as  Matthew  Arnold's  views  of  justi- 
fication by  faith,  in  "St.  Paul  and  Protestantism." 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  437 

Yet  the  latter  was  sure  that  his  view  would  prevail 
against  like  opposition  and,  as  he  wrote  to  his  mo- 
ther, "with  a  like  safety  to  true  religion."^ 

These  letters  abound  in  expressions  of  an  ambi- 
tion to  give  more  intelligence  and  reality  to  the  reli- 
gious convictions  which  play  so  great  a  part  in 
human  affairs. 

"It  will  more  and  more  become  evident  how 
entirely  religious  is  the  work  I  have  done  in  '  Lit- 
erature and  Dogma'  [he  wrote  to  his  sister  in  1874]. 
.  .  .  For  it  is  my  belief,  at  any  rate,  that  I  give 
something  positive,  which  to  a  great  many  people 
may  be  of  the  very  greatest  comfort  and  service. 
And  this  is  in  part  an  answer  to  what  you  say  about 
treating  with  lightness  what  is  matter  of  life  and 
death  to  so  many  people.  There  is  a  levity  which 
is  altogether  evil ;  but  to  treat  miracles  and  the  com- 
mon anthropomorphic  ideas  of  God  as  what  one  may 
lose,  and  yet  keep  one's  hope,  courage,  and  joy,  as 
what  are  not  really  matters  of  life  and  death  in  the 
keeping  or  losing  of  them,  this  is  desirable  and 
necessary,  if  one  holds,  as  I  do,  that  the  common 
anthropomorphic  ideas  of  God  and  the  reliance  on 
miracles  must  and  will  inevitably  pass  away.  .  . 
When  I  see  the  conviction  of  the  ablest  and  most 
serious  men  round  me  that  a  great  change  must  come, 
a  great  plunge  must  be  taken,  I  think  it  well  .  .  . 
instead  of  simply  dilating  ...  on  the  plunge's  utter- 
ness,  tremendousness,  and  awfulness,  to  show  man- 
kind that  it  need  not  be  in  terror  and  despair,  that 
everything  essential  to  its  progress  stands  firm  and 
unchanofed."^ 

1  Nov.  13,  1869  ;  Letters,  vol.  ii. 

»  Letters  of  Oct.  2  aud  November  (?),  1874  ;  vol.  ii 


43»  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

As  the  title  of  "  Literature  and  Dogma  "  suggests,  he 
recognized  the  vital  relation  which  literature  bears 
to  religion,  and  illustrated  the  matter  by  a  very  co- 
gent criticism  upon  the  late  Lord  Salisbury. 

"Religion  he  knows  and  physical  science  he 
knows,  but  the  immense  work  between  the  two,  which 
is  for  literature  to  accomplish,  he  knows  nothing  of, 
and  all  his  speeches  at  Oxford  pointed  this  way.  On 
the  one  hand,  he  was  full  of  the  great  future  for 
physical  science,  and  begging  the  University  to  make 
up  her  mind  to  it,  and  to  resign  much  of  her  literary 
studies  ;  on  the  other  hand,  he  was  full,  almost  de- 
fiantly full,  of  counsels  and  resolves  for  retaining 
and  upholding  the  old  ecclesiastical  and  dogmatic 
form  of  religion.  From  a  juxtaposition  of  this  kind 
nothing  but  shocks  and  collisions  can  come.  .  .  .  All 
this  pressed  a  good  deal  upon  my  mind  at  Oxford, 
and  made  me  anxious,  but  I  do  hope  that  what  in- 
fluence I  have  may  be  of  use  in  the  troubled  times 
which  I  see  are  before  us  as  a  healing  and  reconcil- 
ing influence.*" 

For  this  office  of  peacemaker  he  had  some  very 
high  qualifications  :  an  earnest  purpose,  a  keen  in- 
telligence, genuine  good  temper,  a  quick  sense  of 
humour,  and  a  rare  turn  for  banter  in  which  the 
sting  of  irony  was  generally,  though  not  always, 
mitigated  by  kindliness.  No  English  essayist  of  his 
century  has  better  illustrated  those  felicities  of  style 
which  we  ascribe  to  the  French :  keenness,  swiftness, 
aptness,  and  lucidity  ;  and  the  lesson  was  needed  in 
To  his  Mother,  June  25,  1870  ;  Letters,  vol.  ii. 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  439 

a  day  when  Anglo-Saxons  in  general  and  Americans 
in  particular  were  in  danger  of  exalting  German 
clumsiness  and  ineptitude  into  a  sort  of  fetich.  Re- 
petitious he  may  sometimes  have  seemed  to  be ;  but 
the  repetitions  were  generally  of  phrases  which  served 
him  as  a  refrain  or  chorus.  They  were  significant  in 
themselves  and  perfectly  adapted  to  grip  the  memory. 
Hence  he  became  the  master  phrase-maker  of  his 
generation.  "  Sweetness  and  light  "  ;  "The  Philis- 
tines ";  the  doctrine  of  "  the  remnant ";  the  com- 
pany "of  those  who  would  live  in  the  Spirit"; 
"  Hebraism  and  Hellenism  ":  these  phrases  suggest 
how  keen  was  his  insight,  and  how  ethical  his  tem- 
per ;  but  rich  as  many  of  them  are  in  rehgious  con- 
tent, they  fail  to  measure  the  saturation  of  his  mind 
with  Biblical  and  devotional  thought,  or  the  degree 
in  which  his  style  reflected  it.  "  St.  Paul  and  Pro- 
testantism," or  "  Literature  and  Dogma,"  might  be 
expected  to  utter  the  language  of  religion  ;  but  its 
speech  proved  just  as  needful  to  the  purposes  of 
*'  Culture  and  Anarchy."  There  the  devotional  pre- 
cepts of  Bishop  Wilson  recur  so  frequently  that  an 
eminent  scientific  reader  supposed  Wilson  to  be  a 
figment  of  the  author's  own  imagination  ;  and  the 
concluding  words  of  the  Introduction,  written  when 
the  essays  were  published  in  a  volume,  sums  up  the 
whole  matter  both  for  Literature  and  for  Life. 

**  *  If  ye  know  these  things,  happy  are  ye  if  ye  do 
them  ! '  —  the  last  word  for  infirm  humanity  will 
always  be  that.    For  this  word,  reiterated  with  a 


440  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

power  now  sublime,  now  affecting,  but  always  ad- 
mirable, our  race  will,  so  long  as  the  world  lasts, 
return  to  Hebraism  ;  and  the  Bible,  which  preaches 
this  word,  will  forever  remain,  as  Goethe  called  it, 
not  only  a  national  book,  but  the  Book  of  the  Na- 
tions. Again  and  again  after  what  seem  breaches 
and  separations,  the  prophetic  promise  to  Jerusalem 
will  still  be  true :  Xo,  thy  sons  come,  whom  thou 
sentest  away  ;  they  come  gathered  from  the  west 
unto  the  east  by  the  word  of  the  Holy  One,  rejoic- 
ing in  the  remembrance  of  God.''  ^ 

It  is  difficult  to  pass  on  to  the  concluding  section 
of  this  chapter  without  a  word  concerning  James  An- 
thony Froude.  His  literary  career  furnishes  both  a 
parallel  and  a  contrast  to  that  of  Matthew  Arnold. 
It  was  as  stormy  as  Arnold's  was  placid  and  urbane, 
and  grew  out  of  a  violent  spiritual  struggle  to  which 
Arnold  seems  to  have  been  upon  the  whole  immune. 
Froude  was  like  Arnold,  however,  in  his  recognition 
of  religion's  fascination.  He  could  not  let  it  alone. 
The  "  History  of  England  "  is  a  great  Protestant 
pamphlet,  in  which  his  case  is  so  overstated  as  to 
invite  a  revulsion  of  feeling.  The  "  Short  Studies  " 
are  shot  through,  now  with  genuinely  religious,  and 
now  with  sectarian  feeling;  and  even  a  fragmentary 
book  of  travel  like  "  Oceana  "  —  another  pamphlet, 
be  it  remembered,  though  in  the  interests  of  impe- 
rialism—  does  not  escape  the  religious  influence. 
Froude  seemed  to  be  an  incurable  spiritual  dyspep- 
tic, with  all  a  dyspeptic's  perverse  and  abnormal 

*  Culture  and  Anarchy j  p.  be. 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  441 

appetite  for  the  things  most  certain  to  disagree  with 
him.  There  was  much  in  the  orthodoxy  of  his  day 
that  Arnold  could  neither  stomach  for  himself  nor 
abide  for  others ;  but  he  had  a  sure  discernment 
^^for  the  things  by  which  men  live  ";  ^  he  saw  them 
in  a  high  light,  and  he  gave  them  positive  and  lucid 
expression.  This  happy  faculty  was  denied  to  Froude. 
Keligion,  and  the  principles  of  individual  and  na- 
tional conduct,  claimed  his  keenest  interest.  He 
could  dogmatize  about  them  very  eloquently;  he 
probably  could  have  died  for  his  convictions  with 
respect  to  them ;  but  he  could  not  keep  them  in  the 
light,  or  discover  the  elements  of  their  comfort.  He 
always  saw  the  pillar  of  cloud  and  fire  so  near  as 
to  find  himself  either  befogged  or  daunted ;  Arnold 
viewed  it  in  sufficiently  true  perspective  to  catch  its 
guiding  purpose. 

The  relation  between  the  doubter  and  the  mys- 
tic is  entirely  a  natural  one.  Just  as  one  of  the 
by-products  of  the  work  of  '  rationalist '  and  ^  secu- 
larist '  associations  is  likely  to  be  an  occasional  out- 
burst of  superstition,  so  the  age  which  makes  much 
of  dubious  inquiry  into  the  sources  of  faith  is  bound 
to  breed  a  certain  non-rational,  if  not  irrational, 
type  of  faith.  Heart  and  will  refuse  to  be  put  per- 
manently out  of  commission  by  the  tyranny  of  the 

^  He  loved  to  quote  bits  of  the  Old  Testament  like  this  in  his  fa- 
miliar letters.  Cf.  Letter  to  M.  Fontanes,  June  29,  1883  ;  Letters, 
vol.  ii. 


442  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

reasoning  faculty,  especially  when,  from  inadequate 
premisses,  it  insists  upon  moving  toward  negative 
conclusions.  I  am  aware  that  modern  psychology 
declines  to  recognize  this  three-fold  division  of  the 
soul ;  but  there  is  a  something  in  experience  which 
corresponds  to  it,  and  drives  us,  either  to  these  ex- 
pressions, or  to  attempt  the  discovery  of  their  par- 
allels. "  Low  grades  of  being  want  low  objects ;  but 
the  want  of  man  is  God."  Man  may  dispute  until  the 
end  of  time  about  his  definitions  of  God  and  his 
methods  of  approach  to  Him;  but  he  pretty  stead- 
fastly declines  to  be  satisfied  with  the  modern  creed 
of  agnosticism :  "  God  is  so  great  —  if  there  be  a 
God  —  that  He  is  none  of  my  business."  The  more 
dogmatic  the  negation,  the  more  absurd  the  form 
of  assertion  is  likely  to  prove.  Now  and  then  the 
contradiction  is  emphasized  by  some  delightful 
inconsistency  in  a  single  character,  and  one  finds 
Matthew  Arnold  himself  guilty  of  the  irreverence 
of  the  "  Three  Lord  Shaf  tesburys  "  on  the  one  hand, 
and  on  the  other  resolutely  turning  to  the  East  dur- 
ing the  Creed,  when  worshipping  in  Harrow  Chapel,^ 
even  though  the  clergy  neglected  the  observance. 
It  was  not  a  meaningless  or  uncandid  act.  Arnold 
felt  deeply  the  appeal  of  services  of  worship.  They 
stood  for  something  real  and  vital  in  the  experience 
of  men.  He  believed  that  some  of  the  ideas  un- 
derlying them,  however,  were  mistaken  and  inade- 
quate. These  he  did  not  hesitate  to  criticise ;  but  he 

»  Matthew  Arnold,  by  G.  W.  E.  Russell,  p.  '261. 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  443 

was  at  the  same  time  so  confident  that  the  impulse 
toward  faith  and  its  expression  was  normal  and 
necessary,  that  he  begrudged  the  giving  up  of  well- 
established  forms  as  heartily  as  he  deplored  the  ex- 
cesses of  the  ritualists.  His  attitude  raises  a  smile 
because  the  world  at  large  knows  him  as  a  critic  so 
much  better  than  it  knew  him  as  a  worshipper. 

The  very  fact  of  the  emphasis  placed  by  him 
and  his  generation  upon  criticism  would  lead  us  to 
expect  a  corresponding  emphasis  by  others  upon 
unquestioning  behef.  Sometimes  this  was  frankly 
dogmatic,  as  in  the  case  of  Lord  Shaftesbury,  and 
the  straiter  sects  of  Evangelicals,  Dissenters,  and 
High  Churchmen.  Occasionally  it  was  instinctive 
and  mystical,  as  in  the  case  of  Christina  Rossetti. 
Her  contributions  to  literature  were  neither  of  an 
extent  nor  of  a  type  to  justify  large  notice  here. 
Yet  she  not  only  illustrates  the  haunting  power 
which  reHgious  mysticism  gives  to  poetry,  but 
serves  as  a  connecting  link  between  the  mysticism 
of  religion  and  that  new  influence  in  art  and  liter- 
ature represented  by  her  brother  Gabriel  and  the 
Pre-Raphaelites.  A  mystic  may  be  a  person  of 
clearly  defined  or  of  utterly  hazy  religious  con- 
victions. The  word  'mysticism'  has  been  vulgar- 
ized, as  so  many  great  words  are,  until  in  news- 
paper parlance  it  has  degenerated  into  a  term  of 
half-patronizing  contempt.  The  clairvoyant,  the 
medium,  and  the  wizard  who  peeps  and  mutters, 
are  supposed  to  represent  it.  So  are  those  who  seek 


444  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

strange  gods  and  rites  out  of  the  ^mystic  East.' 
The  dreamer  of  dreams  and  seer  of  visions,  espe- 
cially if  he  be  given  to  exploiting  his  revelations  for 
the  sake  of  gain  or  notoriety,  is  assigned  to  the  same 
company.  These  misrepresent  mysticism,  however, 
very  much  as  fanaticism  and  superstition  misrepre- 
sent religion.  Exactly  as  some  men  have  what  we 
call  a  *  genius  *  for  physics,  chemistry,  or  mathe- 
matics, which  enables  them  to  reach  at  a  bound 
conclusions  toward  which  other  men  must  needs 
plod,  so  in  the  realm  of  spirit  some  would  appear  to 
possess  a  discernment  which  gives  to  the  spiritual  a 
reality  denied  to  the  visible  and  tangible.  There  are 
men  whose  instincts  with  reference  to  the  possible 
applications  of  a  mysterious  force  like  electricity  are 
more  significant  than  the  laboured  formulas  of  their 
fellows.  The  instinct  reaches  its  conclusion  by  a 
leap;  but,  having  arrived,  it  will,  if  it  be  sane  and 
serviceable,  begin  to  look  at  once  for  the  rational 
connection  between  its  points  of  arrival  and  depar- 
ture ;  It  gladly  awaits  the  endorsement  of  experi- 
ence ;  yet  not  always.  A  mechanic  may  sometimes 
be  found  whose  questioning  finger  moves  with  mys- 
terious assurance  to  the  seat  of  trouble  in  a  halting 
machine,  and  who  treats  the  plodding  reasoner  with 
a  sort  of  contempt.  The  measure  of  his  contempt  is, 
of  course,  the  measure  of  his  limitation.  If  he  de- 
spise reason  and  the  processes  of  logic,  he  is  so  far 
forth  to  be  regarded  with  suspicion ;  but  such  are 
the  contradictions  of  personality  that  he  does  not 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  445 

therefore  invalidate  his  use  as  a  mechanic.  He 
may  combine  exceptional  gifts  for  the  swift  com- 
prehension of  a  mechanical  problem  with  a  very 
meagrely  developed  nature.  Understanding  ma- 
chines with  almost  uncanny  sympathy,  he  may  un- 
derstand little  else  adequately.  It  is  neither  neces- 
sarily nor  commonly  so,  but  the  thing  is  conceivable. 
The  mystic  in  his  simplest  form  is  the  man  with 
an  instinct  for  the  realities  that  underlie  appearance. 
His  instinct  may  be  true,  deep,  and  keen,  leading 
him  to  momentous  conclusions  ;  or  it  may  prove  so 
fatuous  and  ill  regulated  as  to  end  simply  in  dab- 
bling and  pretence.  There  are  little  and  great  souls 
here  as  elsewhere.  The  great  souls,  like  St.  John  or 
St.  Theresa,  trust  their  instincts  at  the  same  time 
that  they  insist  upon  their  coordination  with  large 
and  well-defined  principles  of  life.  St.  John  exulted 
in  his  vision  of  the  Word  made  Flesh  ;  but  no  vision 
was  worth  much,  except  the  man  who  saw  it  loved 
his  brother,  and  translated  his  love  into  brotherly 
acts.  St.  Theresa  sat  at  times  before  a  window  which 
seemed  to  open  into  Heaven  itself ;  but  when  she 
arose  from  beholding  the  glory,  it  was  to  prove  to 
the  world  her  possession  of  great  and  beneficent 
practical  gifts.  In  true  mysticism  there  is  rarely  any 
element  of  the  grotesque  or  the  bizarre ;  never  any 
strangeness  for  the  sake  of  the  strange ;  but  rather 
a  reahzation  of  that  larger  world  of  which  the  visi- 
ble and  tangible  frame  of  our  experience  is  but  the 
husk.  Sometimes  the  realization  is  intense  and  over- 


446  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

powering ;  sometimes  but  a  haunting  conviction  at 
the  heart  of  life.  The  risen  Lazarus  in  Browning's 
"Epistle/'  with  his  abnormal  sensitiveness  to  the  pos- 
sible issues  of  his  boy's  chance  word,  and  his  relative 
indifference  to  the  gathering  Roman  armies,  is  an 
extreme  instance  of  the  former ;  Wordsworth,  with 
his  keen  sense  of  the  frame  of  things  wherein  his 
daily  life  was  set,  —  the  mountains,  streams,  flowers 
and  weather  of  Westmoreland, — and  his  occasional 
glimpses  through  it  of  — 

A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 

All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 

And  rolls  through  all  things, 

represents  a  far  more  normal  type. 

The  appeal  of  mysticism  to  the  imagination  is 
of  course  immediate ;  its  large  use  of  the  symbolic 
belongs  to  its  very  nature;  and  its  tendency  toward 
literary  expression  is  therefore  natural. 

The  mysticism  of  Christina  Rossetti  represents  a 
somewhat  extreme  form  of  the  nineteenth-century 
type.  Inheriting  aesthetic  talent  of  a  high  order, 
almost  as  naturally  she  seems  to  have  entered  into 
possession  of  an  unquestioning  faith.  She  was  ex- 
ceptionally gifted,  too,  in  respect  both  of  imagi- 
nation and  an  eye  which  observed  the  world  of 
flower,  bird,  and  insect  with  keenness  and  humour. 

The  mouse  paused  in  his  walk 
And  dropped  his  wheaten  stalk  ; 
Grave  cattle  wagged  their  heads 
In  rumination ; 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  447 

The  eagle  gave  a  cry 
From  his  cloud  station ; 
Larks  on  thyme  beds 
Forbore  to  mount  or  sing ; 
Bees  drooped  upon  the  wing ; 
The  raven  perched  on  high 
Forgot  his  ration ; 
The  conies  in  their  rock, 
A  feeble  nation, 
Quaked  sympathetica! ; 

all  this  in  fellow-feeling  with  Eve's  penitential 
grief.  The  connection  between  sorrow  of  heart  for 
sin  and  the  wonder  of  nature's  interrupted  course 
is  characteristic  of  the  mystics  in  general,  and  of 
Christina  Rossetti  in  particular.  Practically  all  her 
work  is  religious ;  "  Goblin-Market "  is  a  sort  of 
parable,  and  so  colloquial  a  piece  as  "No  thank 
you,  John "  has  its  reference  to  the  mystery  of 
Earth's  sorrow  and  its  need  of  cure.  A  poem  like 
"  From  House  to  Home  "  serves  as  an  admirable 
illustration  of  the  response  which  so  many  poets 
have  made  to  the  music  of  Scripture  language, 
and  the  skill  which  Miss  Rossetti  had  in  versify- 
ing it. 

Although  to-day  I  walk  in  tedious  ways, 

To-day  His  staff  is  turned  into  a  rod, 

Yet  will  I  wait  for  Him  the  appointed  days 

And  stay  upon  my  God. 

Even  in  "  Sing-Song,"  the  nursery-rhyme  book 
dedicated  to  the  infant  son  of  Professor  Cay  ley  of 
Cambridge,  verses  may  be  found  which  breathe 
the  very  breath  of  the  Spirit. 


448  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Who  has  ever  seen  the  wind  ? 

Neither  I  nor  you  : 
But  when  the  leaves  hang  trembling, 

The  wind  is  passing  thro'. 

Who  has  ever  seen  the  wind  ? 

Neither  you  nor  I : 
But  when  the  trees  bow  down  their  heads, 

The  wind  is  passing  by. 

There  is  sometimes,  too,  a  tendency  toward  over- 
wrought humility  that  may  seem  to  accord  better 
with  the  intensity  of  her  Italian  blood  than  with 
her  English  speech. 

Give  me  the  lowest  place :  or  if  for  me 
That  lowest  place  too  high,  make  one  more  low 
Where  I  may  sit  and  see 
My  God  and  love  Thee  so, 

savours  a  little  of  exaggeration  and  of  feeling  cul- 
tivated for  its  own  sake ;  just  as  the  question  and 
answer,  — 

Does  the  road  wind  up-hill  all  the  way  ? 

Yes,  to  the  very  end. 
Will  the  day's  journey  take  the  whole  long  day  ? 

From  morn  to  night,  my  friend, 

seem  to  overemphasize  the  sombre  and  unrelenting 
features  of  experience. 

Both  the  Rossettis  tended  to  make  too  much  of 
the  dreamy  and  anaemic  side  of  mysticism,  and 
so  far  forth  represented  a  decadent  phase  of  it. 
Christina's  religious  faith  was,  to  be  sure,  vigour- 
ous  enough  upon  the  dogmatic  side.  Her  brother, 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  449 

Dante  Gabriel,  was  careless  of  dogma,  but  respon- 
sive to  the  art  values  of  religion,  and  to  some  of 
those  features  in  experience  which  welcome  reli- 
gion's appeal.  His  "  Death  Parting  "  for  instance, 
which  begins, — 

Leaves  and  rain  and  the  days  of  the  year 

(  Water-willow  and  wellaway) , 
All  these  fall  and  my  soul  gives  ear, 
Ajid  she  is  hence  who  once  was  here 

(  With  a  wind  blown  night  and  day) ,  — 

not  only  illustrates  the  old  poignancy  of  the  sor- 
row of  parting,  which  has  been  the  theme  of  poet 
and  preacher  since  literature  began,  but  exempli- 
fies too  the  half-mystical  device  (one  is  tempted  to 
call  it  pseudo-mystical)  of  symbolizing  this  feeling 
by  a  refrain  whose  meaning,  if  it  have  any,  is  only 
that  of  a  rhythmic  sigh.  The  whole  Pre-Raphael- 
ite school  tended  in  this  direction  of  musical  but 
fragile  languor.  The  frequent  beauty  of  the  result 
could  not  permanently  keep  it  from  decay,  and  the 
thing  finally  degenerated  into  the  absurdities  of 
aestheticism  and  the  sinister  grotesquerie  of  Aubrey 
Beardsley  and  the  "Yellow  Book."  But  this  was 
not  until  it  had  produced  notable  results  of  a  sub- 
stantial and  beneficent  tj^e,  both  in  literature  and 
art.  To  speak  of  the  work  of  Holman  Hunt,  Watts, 
and  B  urn  e- Jones  is  beside  my  present  purpose.  Nor 
can  I  stop  to  characterize  the  contributions  of  Mr. 
Watts-Dunton  to  poetry  and  criticism,  beyond  re- 
marking that  his  Essay  upon  the  "  Renascence  of 


450  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Wonder"  is  one  of  the  sanest  and  most  generous 
appreciations  of  the  deeper  relations  between  lit- 
erature and  the  life  of  man's  soul  which  the  clos- 
ing century  produced. 

In  "  Soothsay  "  Kossetti  exhorts  his  fellow-mys- 
tics in  this  fashion :  — 

To  God  at  best,  to  chance  at  worst, 
Give  thanks  for  good  things,  last  as  first. 
But  windstrown  blossom  is  that  good 
Whose  apple  is  not  gratitude. 
Even  if  no  prayer  uplift  thy  face, 
Let  the  sweet  right  to  render  grace 
As  thy  soul's  cherished  child  be  nurs'd. 

The  doctrine  is  wholesome;  the  simile  in  the 
third  and  fourth  lines  obscure,  with  a  sort  of  la- 
boured obscurity  for  which  the  whole  school  had 
a  perverse  appetite.  They  preached  simplicity,  and 
then  elaborated  it,  sometimes  ruggedly  and  some- 
times daintily,  until  it  ceased  to  be  simplicity  at 
all. 

Among  the  brethren  of  the  ^rugged'  school 
William  Morris  stands  preeminent,  —  a  fine  and 
often  noble,  though  not  always  gracious  figure, 
amid  the  literary  and  social  leaders  of  his  day. 
He  had,  what  every  revolutionist  ought  to  have, 
Tennyson's  ^Passion  of  the  Past'  —  though  it  was 
not  Tennyson's  Past.  It  would  be  going  much  too 
far  to  claim  for  him  any  clear  historic  sense,  or 
any  literary  gift  of  quite  the  first  order.  He  saw 
the   past   of   Northman  and   early  Saxon  by  the 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  461 

glamour  of  the  Saga's  light;  and  even  the  later 
English  life  of  the  historic  middle  age  he  ideaHzed. 
This  was  done  partly  at  the  instance  of  his  zeal  for 
handicraft,  and  partly,  it  would  seem,  from  his 
intense  love  of  the  material  face  of  England,  her 
woods,  streams,  and  fields,  which  led  him  to  dream 
of  them  as  they  must  have  existed  in  other  days, 
with  a  sort  of  ecstasy.  The  most  casual  reader  of 
"  The  Folk-mote  by  the  River,"  with  its  description 
of  the  sturdy  mowers  going  forth  long  before  dawn 
to  cut  the  grass  upon  the  Elders'  Mound,  about 
which  the  oppressed  people  were  to  gather  and  plan 
local  revolution,  will  remember  how  redolent  it  is 
both  of  morning's  freshness  and  of  a  people's  need. 
The  inspiration  is  as  real  as  that  of  Shelley's  "  Sky- 
lark," though  of  mundane  instead  of  celestial 
quality. 

So  what  I  have  called  his  "Passion  of  the  Past" 
has  little  of  the  Tennysonian  poignancy.  It  is  gen- 
erally so  robust  as  to  suggest  the  robustious.  Hall- 
biorn  and  Snaebiorn,  for  instance,  both  love  Hall- 
gerd.  Hallbiorn  wins  her ;  but  finding  her  still 
cherishing  a  fondness  for  his  rival,  and  loth  to 
leave  her  father's  for  her  husband's  home,  trans- 
fixes her  with  his  sword  and  rides  away.  Snaebiorn 
pursues,  overtakes,  and  slays  him  after  a  mighty 
struggle ;  and  then  himself  seeks  refuge  in  saihng 
westward  from  the  Iceland  which  is  the  scene  of 
such  tragedy  to  — 

A  grave  beneath  the  Greenland  snow. 


452  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

The  tragedy  is  real  enough.  There  is  the  inevitable 
refrain  to  mark  time's  passing  and  sorrow's  pre- 
sence, — 

So  many  times  over  comes  summer  again, 


What  healing  in  summer  if  winter  be  vain  ! 

But  in  spite  of  this  the  fighting  goes  with  such 
gusto, and  the  ^business'  of  the  tragedy  is  so  heartily 
managed,  that  the  effect  of  slaying  men  is  almost 
as  cheerful  as  that  of  mowing  grass.  Morris  was 
so  tremendously  energetic  as  Poet,  Socialist,  and 
Handicraftsman,  that  his  product  too  often  bore  the 
marks  of  haste.  He  impressed  himself  in  the  man- 
ner of  a  devoted  steam-engine  rather  than  by  the 
haunting  power  of  the  still  small  voice.  His  was  one 
of  those  natures  which  seem  to  have  little  time  for 
religious  thought  and  no  patience  with  religious 
observance.  It  would  be  an  affectation  to  attempt 
to  trace  a  ^religious  element'  in  his  work.  Yet  the 
place  which  Greek  and  Norse  mythology  occupied 
in  his  poems,  and  the  influence  of  the  Sagas  upon 
his  style  are  worth  noting ;  while  his  overmastering 
zeal  as  a  champion  of  the  oppressed,  a  reformer  of 
bad  industrial  conditions,  and  a  social  revolutionist, 
brought  him  into  vital  touch  with  essential  religion. 
It  is  here  that  he  illustrates  my  thesis  of  the  literary 
worth  of  the  religious  impulse;  for  among  the  most 
memorable  work  that  Morris  did  is  that  in  which 
he  sets  forth  the  burdens,  the  rights,  and  the  hopes 
of  plain  people.  "  The  Burghers'  Battle  "  is  a  war- 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  453 

song,  but  one  which  Peace  Societies  might  well 
reprint. 

Thick  rise  the  spear-shafts  o'er  the  land 

That  erst  the  harvest  bore ; 

The  sword  is  heavy  in  the  hand, 

And  we  return  no  more. 


Across  our  stubble  acres  now 

The  teams  go  four  and  four ; 

But  out-worn  elders  guide  the  plough, 

And  we  return  no  more. 

And  now  the  women  heavy-eyed 
Turn  through  the  open  door, 
From  gazing  down  the  highway  wide, 
Where  we  return  no  more. 

And  crops  shall  cover  field  and  hill 
Unlike  what  once  they  bore, 
And  all  be  done  without  our  will. 
Now  we  return  no  more. 

Look  up !  The  arrows  streak  the  sky, 
The  horns  of  battle  roar ; 
The  long  spears  lower  and  draw  nigh. 
And  we  return  no  more. 

In  poems  like  "  The  God  of  the  Poor/'  "  The  Day 
of  Days,"  "  A  Death  Song,"  and  ^'  Hope  Dieth ;  Love 
Liveth,"  he  preached  his  gospel  of  social  revolution, 
and  usually  with  a  spirit  of  confidence  and  good 
temper.  The  temper  is  stern,  however,  but  all  the 
more  effective  in  its  sternness  because  it  refuses  to 
be  violent.  Here,  for  instance,  is  the  arraignment  of 
the  rich  by  the  poor,  and  the  refrain  which  voices 


464  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

their  determination  to  strive  until  the  end  for  more 
equal  conditions. 

We  asked  them  for  a  life  of  toilsome  earning, 
They  bade  us  bide  their  leisure  for  our  bread ; 
We  craved  to  speak  to  tell  our  woeful  learning ; 
We  come  back  speechless,  bearing  back  our  dead. 
Not  one,  not  one,  nor  thousands  must  they  slay. 
But  one  and  all  if  they  would  dusk  the  day. 

They  will  not  learn ;  they  have  no  ears  to  hearken ; 
They  turn  their  faces  from  the  eyes  of  fate ; 
Their  gay-lit  halls  shut  out  the  skies  that  darken. 
But,  lo !  this  dead  man  knocking  at  the  gate. 
Not  one,  not  one,  nor  thousands  must  they  slay, 
But  one  and  all  if  they  would  du^k  the  day. 

Mazzini  somewhere  says  that  there  can  be  no  re- 
ligion without  a  new  sense  of  the  unity  and  solidarity 
of  the  human  race.^  In  poems  like  "  The  March  of 
the  Workers  "  Morris  gives  his  own  stirring  version 
of  the  same  truth.  It  is  not  expressed  in  the  accepted 
formulas  of  religion ;  but  it  echoes  the  preaching 
of  Christ,  and  its  real  though  broken  music  finely 
symbohzes  the  troubled  efforts  of  society  toward  a 
better  harmony. 

On  we  march  then,  we  the  workers,  and  the  rumour  that  ye  hear 
Is  the  blended  sound  of  battle  and  deliv'rance  drawing  near ; 
For  the  hope  of  every  creature  is  the  banner  that  we  bear, 
And  the  world  is  marching  on. 
Hark  the  rolling  of  the  thunder ! 
Lo  the  sun !  and  lo  thereunder 
Riseth  wrath,  and  hope,  and  wonder. 
And  the  host  comes  marching  on ! 
1  C£.  G.  A.  Johnstone  Ross,  in  Hibbert  Journal,  July,  1908,  p.  763. 


THE  DOUBTERS   AND  THE  MYSTICS  455 

In  writing  down  the  name  of  Edward  FitzGerald, 
one  is  very  conscious  that  he  refused  to  be  included 
in  any  formal  class  or  category.  Yet  there  is  a 
sense  in  which  he  belongs  to  this  chapter,  since  his 
real  introduction  to  the  world  was  by  means  of 
Omar^  doubter  and  mystic  both.  There  is  some- 
thing almost  ludicrous  in  the  enormous  vogue  which 
FitzGerald's  quatrains  won.  Their  workmanship, 
subtlety,  and  boldness  merit  all  that  can  be  said 
in  their  praise ;  their  future  is  secure ;  but  the 
true  FitzGerald  lover  is  tempted  to  think  that  this 
must  be  in  spite  rather  than  because  of  the  extrava- 
gant fashion  in  which  Omar  Khayyam  Clubs  have 
been  formed,  variorum  editions  and  Latin  transla- 
tions issued,  and  levant  bindings  crushed  into  the 
service  of  publicity.  I  have  been  asked  strange 
questions  about  the  puzzling  little  book  in  drawing- 
rooms  where  it  lay  for  ornament's  sake;  and  I 
could  wish  that  FitzGerald  might  have  lived  to 
hear  of  the  commercial  traveller  who  confessed 
that,  despite  all  efforts,  he  could  not  keep  clear  the 
distinction  between  Omar  Khayyam  and  Hunyadi 
Jan  OS. 

That  Fate  which  the  quatrains  celebrate  could 
scarce  have  devised  a  more  whimsical  irony  than 
the  disinterring  of  this  recluse,  with  his  petulance 
and  patience,  his  rudeness  and  tenderness,  his  dole- 
ful marriage  and  his  steadfast  affiance  to  the  fisher- 
man, "Posh,"  his  admiration  for  Dickens  and  his 
loyal  friendship  with  Thackeray,  his  wholesome 


406  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

and  never-to-be-forgotten  love  of  the  German  Ocean 
and  George  Crabbe's  poems ;  his  plaid  shawl,  low 
shoes,  short  trousers,  shuffling  gait,  and  incompar- 
able letters.  So  determined  was  the  man  himself 
upon  burial  alive  in  the  seclusion  of  the  East 
Anglian  coast  towns  that  Mr.  Aldis  Wright,  with 
his  library  of  letters,  and  Mr.  Thomas  Wright,  with 
his  volumes  of  biography,  seemed  at  first  like  body- 
snatchers.  Yet  of  all  the  poets  discussed  in  this 
chapter,  his,  it  is  safe  to  say,  is  the  most  affection- 
ately remembered  name,  unless  we  except  Clough, 
and  FitzGerald  will  be  known  to  a  thousand  where 
Clough  is  read  by  a  score.  No  doubt  his  eccentricity 
adds  spice  to  the  feast  he  spreads  before  his  guest. 
But  beyond  that  there  was  a  personality  which, 
speaking  occasionally  through  the  poems,  and 
habitually  through  the  letters,  tempts  the  reader  to 
share  Thackeray's  confession  that  FitzGerald  was 
his  best-loved  friend. 

There  is  no  need  to  inquire  curiously  into  the 
secret  of  his  charm ;  but  certain  elements  of  it  are 
described  in  saying  that  he  had  an  ^  understanding 
heart.'  Recluse  though  he  was,  he  saw,  with  some- 
thing of  a  mystic's  instinct,  into  the  pervading 
trouble  of  his  time ;  not  only  saw  it,  but  felt  for  it 
with  a  deeper  sympathy  than  any  sentimentalist 
could  fathom.  The  note  of  pathos  is  not  unlike 
that  in  his  friend  Thackeray ;  sounded  only  occa- 
sionally, but  then  with  such  simplicity  and  restraint 
as  to  make  it  doubly  memorable.  There  is  a  stanza 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  467 

in  "  Bredfield  Hall "  not  readily  forgotten  by  those 
who  know  old  houses  and  something  of  the  ties 
that  in  country  places  bind  home  and  church  and 
passing  generations  to  one  another.  The  various 
occupants  of  the  Hall  are  made  to  live  and  go  their 
appointed  ways  before  us,  — 

Till  the  Bell  that  not  in  vain 

Had  summoned  them  to  weekly  prayer, 

Called  them  one  by  one  again 

To  the  Church  —  and  left  them  there ! 

This  same  instinct  for  the  deeper  experience 
and  meaning  of  common  days  led  FitzGerald,  in 
his  adaptation  of  Omar,  to  depict  inimitably  the 
strangely  mingled  zest  and  satiety  of  the  third 
•quarter  of  his  century.  Men  had  their  old-time 
appetite  for  the  Wine  and  Song  of  Life ;  yet  Life's 
contradictions  thrust  their  way  more  persistently 
than  ever  to  the  banquet  table.  Their  curiosity  was 
at  once  fed  and  whetted  by  physical  discoveries 
that  were  making  the  age  famous ;  yet  the  ultimate 
and  really  significant  questions  of  the  heart  were  as 
clamant  as  of  old ;  though  their  utterance  was  ham- 
pered, and  their  burden  therefore  increased,  by  a 
school  of  thinkers  who  would,  if  they  could,  have 
denied  them  utterance  at  all.  It  is  when  men  are 
told  that  the  instincts  of  their  hearts  are  nonsense 
and  should  be  foregone,  that  they  fall  into  a  mood 
wherein  Omar's  jovial  cynicism  seems  like  a  gos- 
pel to  them;  not  because  he  brings  them  any  par- 
ticular news  of  deliverance,  but  rather  because  he 


458  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

diagnoses  their  ailment  and  voices  their  inarticulate 
feelings.  In  a  day  when  men  still  thought  about 
religion,  but  did  not  know  whether  as  intelligent 
men  they  could  claim  the  right  to  think  about  it 
very  much  longer,  it  chimed  admirably  with  their 
humour  to  hear  this  old-new  poet  singing,  ■ —  and 
with  rare  music,  — 

Myself  when  young  did  eagerly  frequent 
Doctor  and  Saint,  and  heard  great  argument 
About  it  and  about :  but  evermore 
Came  out  by  the  same  door  wherein  I  went. 

Some  among  them  found  their  recurrent  moods  in- 
terpreted by  the  poem's  fatalism ;  others  were  glad 
to  hear  their  feelings  of  blind  rebellion  voiced  by 
such  stanzas  of  defiance  as  that  which  flings  Man's 
forgiveness  at  Fate's  head.  Volumes  of  so-called 
theology,  the  natural  children  of  a  too  lusty  Calvin- 
ism, were  summed  up  in  — 

*'  Why,"  said  another,  "  some  there  are  who  tell 
Of  one  who  threatens  he  will  toss  to  Hell 
The  luckless  Pots  he  marred  in  making  —  Pish  ! 
He 's  a  Good  Fellow,  and  't  will  all  be  well." 

FitzGerald's  day  produced  no  more  telling  argument 
against  sheer  materialism  than  the  humourous  per- 
versity of  this  poem.  I  would  not  debase  it  to  a  beast 
of  burden  by  loading  it  with  a  moral,  yet  none  who 
knew  FitzGerald  could  have  read  the  "  Rubaiyat  " 
without  seeing  in  them  the  finer  original  of  W.  E. 
Henley's  rather  coarse  — 


THE  DOUBTERS  AND  THE  MYSTICS  459 

Let  us  be  drunk,  and  for  a  while  forget, 
Forget,  and  ceasing  even  from  regret. 
Live  without  reason  and  in  spite  of  rhyme. 

What  Henley  meant,  if  indeed  he  meant  anything 
beyond  the  perverse  face-value  of  his  words,  I  do  not 
undertake  to  say;  but  FitzGerald  was  clear-eyed  and 
large-hearted  enough  to  appreciate  the  grim  banter 
of  his  own  work  —  perhaps  the  most  telling  example 
of  reductio  ad  ahsurdum  in  our  literature. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOB  POETRY ' 

This  title  sounds  like  an  ungracious  introduction  to 
a  study  of  recent  English  poetry;  and  when  the 
reader  perceives  that  such  masters  of  their  art  as 
Swinhurne  and  George  Meredith  must  consent  to 
introduce  it,  he  may  even  count  it  sacrilegious. 
The  phrase  ^  minor  poetry'  is  never,  I  believe, 
quite  grateful  to  the  ears  of  poets.  Mr.  William 
Archer  eschews  it  altogether  as  a  "supercilious 
catchword,"  and  entitles  his  interesting  study  of 
contemporary  verse,  "Poets  of  the  Younger  Gen- 
eration." He  is  certain  that  the  taint  of  contempt 
attaches  to  it  and  that  it  has  a  depressing  and  ster- 
ilizing effect.^ 

From  all  suspicion  of  contempt  I  would  at  once 
purge  myself.  '  Minor  poetry '  represents  a  condi- 
tion rather  than  a  critical  aspersion ;  or,  if  criticism 
he  implied,  its  object  is  as  likely  to  be  the  critic  or 
the  public  as  the  poet.  There  is  great  authority  for 
the  wisdom  of  choosing  at  first  an  inconspicuous 
'  place,  and  the  young  poet  has  no  worse  enemy  than 

*  Incorporated  in  this  chapter  are  portions  of  an  article  by  the 
author  published  some  years  ago  in  the  Bibliotheca  Sacra,  under 
the  title,  "  The  Religious  Significance  of  Recent  English  Verse." 

'  Poets  of  the  Younger  Generation,  Introduction,  pp.  1-2. 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  461 

the  eulogist,  who,  upon  the  strength  of  a  slender 
volume  or  two,  would  thrust  him  unbidden  into  the 
choir  of  Immortals ;  since  nothing  is  more  fatal  to 
poets  or  poetry  than  anti-climax. 

He  is  indeed  an  unappreciative  reader  who  de- 
nies or  belittles  the  extraordinary  wealth  of  poetic 
gifts  which  the  last  half-century  has  put  at  his  dis- 
posal. Here  are  verses  to  delight  and  to  amuse ;  to 
instruct,  to  soothe,  and  to  inspire,  —  most  of  them, 
moreover,  the  work  of  finished  craftsmen  as  well 
as  of  inspired  singers.  The  thing  they  lack  is — to 
use  a  hackneyed  phrase  —  the  power  to  compel.  I 
would  not  deny  that  this  note  of  compulsion  is 
sometimes  sounded  and  the  power  exercised.  Who 
of  us  has  not  been  compelled  to  go  his  mile  with 
some  new  poet,  and  rejoicingly  girded  his  loins  for 
twain,  —  only  to  discover,  however,  that  his  guide 
was  the  pilot  of  a  stage  in  life's  journey,  rather 
than  the  Greatheart  who  sees  pilgrims  through. 
Let  due  honour  be  paid  to  these  men.  They  are 
no  "idle  singers  of  an  empty  day."  Their  seri- 
ousness, and  the  real  distinction  with  which  they 
play  their  parts,  are  beyond  cavil.  Yet  they  im- 
press us  as  generally  with  their  limitations  as  with 
their  powers.  Sometimes  it  is  a  limitation  of  range, 
and  sometimes  of  vision ;  but  more  often  it  is  a 
lack  of  depth. 

Let  me  cite  at  once  the  two  names  which  offer 
the  chief  exceptions  to  this  criticism,  —  the  names 
already   mentioned   of   Mr.   Swinburne   and   Mr. 


462  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Meredith.  In  the  case  of  George  Meredith,  I 
believe  the  exception  to  be  real  if  not  apparent ; 
in  the  case  of  Mr.  Swinburne  somewhat  more  ap- 
parent than  real ;  and  for  these  reasons.  When  we 
apply  our  test  questions  to  the  scope  of  their  work, 
—  and  here  the  volume  of  it  is  to  be  taken  into  ac- 
count ;  to  the  extent  of  their  vision,  which  should 
include  the  width  of  their  sympathies ;  and  to  their 
ability  to  sound  the  depths  of  experience,  Mr. 
Meredith  answers  the  last  two  triumphantly  and 
the  first  respectably.  The  volume  of  his  verse  is 
not  great,  and  some  of  that  is  scarcely  poetry ;  but 
his  range  is  still  considerable,  while  the  width  of 
his  sympathies,  the  extent  of  his  vision,  and  the 
depths  of  experience  which  he  has  sounded,  make 
him  one  of  the  great  masters  of  life's  secrets.  The 
limitations  of  Meredith's  power  and  fame  run  par- 
allel to  those  of  Browning.  There  are  some  who 
would  ask  no  higher  praise;  but  the  fact  remains 
that  the  limitations  are  real.  They  are,  moreover,  of 
a  sort  to  hamper  a  poet's  power  in  the  present,  and 
they  are  preeminently  fitted  to  limit  his  fame  in 
the  future. 

Mr.  Meredith  is  reported  to  have  said  once  upon 
a  time  that  henceforth  he  would  write  for  himself, 
since  the  public  of  that  early  day  would  none 
of  what  he  had  tried  to  write  for  it.  An  even 
greater  poet  said  in  his  haste  that  all  men  were 
liars ;  but  he  fortunately  thought  better  of  it,  and 
continued  to  use  their  language  in  the  expression 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  463 

of  truth,  for  which  three  or  four  score  generations 
have  proved  hungry.  It  is  Meredith's  misfortune 
that  he  too  could  not  find  leisure  to  repent  his 
haste,  and  gain  the  upper  hand  of  his  contempt. 
Contemptuous  of  men  and  women  in  general  he 
certainly  is  not;  and  one  of  the  secrets  of  his 
power  as  a  novelist  is  that  he  sees  such  possibili- 
ties half  realized  in  them.  Nor  does  he  doubt  man's 
command  of  his  destiny  and  ability  to  make  it  a 
high  one. 

I  take  the  hap 

Of  all  my  deeds.  The  wind  that  fills  my  sails 

Propels ;  but  I  am  helmsman.^ 

It  is  rather  the  common  medium  of  English  speech 
that  he  dishonours  by  a  style  which  at  times  almost 
ceases  to  be  language,  and  becomes  a  sort  of  hiero- 
glyphic picture-writing,  a  huddling  together  of  the 
salient — and  often  greatly  significant — features  of 
his  thought,  leaving  his  vexed  reader  to  supply  the 
gaps  as  best  he  may.  Let  any  intelligent  person, 
after  his  first,  or  for  that  matter  his  fourth,  un- 
aided reading  of  "  The  Sage  Enamoured  and  the 
Honest  Lady,"  attempt  to  put  upon  paper  his  idea 
even  of  the  poem's  general  drift,  and  he  will 
understand  me.  The  charge  to  be  brought  against 
it  is,  that  in  too  many  respects  it  is  the  lesser 
counterpart  of  "  Sordello " ;  a  mighty  verbal  fog- 
bank,  illumined  here  and  there  by  lightning  flashes 
of  memorable  meaning.  One  is  tempted  at  times 

*  Modem  Love,  xx. 


464  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

to  quote  Meredith  against  himself,  especially  in  the 
love  poems :  — 

Now  seems  the  language  heard  of  Love  as  rain 
To  make  a  mire  where  fruitfulness  was  meant.^ 

It  needs  to  be  straightway  added,  however,  that 
the  fruitfulness  does  not  really  fail,  and  that  the 
mire  bears  no  taint  of  filthiness;  it  is  simply  good 
soil  too  curiously  tilled.  Plain  spoken,  with  a  sort 
of  bucolic  breadth,  Mr.  Meredith  can  be,  as,  for 
instance,  in  the  "  Teaching  of  the  Nude,"  or  once 
and  again  in  his  "Reading  of  Earth";  but  it  is  a 
wholesome  and  honest  plainness,  uncorrupted  by 
dubious  suggestion. 

The  greatness  of  George  Meredith's  poetry  is 
proclaimed,  then,  quite  as  much  in  spite  of  as  by 
means  of  his  craftsmanship;  which,  though  often 
graceful  and  melodious  to  a  degree,  is  as  often 
curious  and  sometimes  merely  grotesque;  but  it  is 
proclaimed  none  the  less,  and  its  elements  are  to 
be  discerned  by  the  most  casual  reader  of  his 
titles.  "Modern  Love,"  "Ballads  and  Poems  of 
Tragic  Life,"  "A  Reading  of  Earth,"  and  "To 
the  Comic  Spirit"  may  serve  to  suggest  these. 
Taken  together  and  viewed  in  the  light  of  the 
sympathy  which  speaks  through  his  treatment  of 
them,  these  titles  place  him  among  the  great  lit- 
erary forces  making  for  sanity  in  the  ethics  and 
religion    of   to-day.    Practically   all   great   poetry 

*  The  Promise  in  Disturbance. 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  466 

deals  with  religion,  and  Mr.  Meredith  appears  at 
once  to  exemplify  this  in  his  use  of  mythological 
subjects  like  the  "  Appeasement  of  Demeter/'  or 
legends  of  the  saints  like  the  "Song  of  Theodo- 
linda"  branding  her  bosom  with  the  red-hot  nail 
from  the  Cross,  or  the  phenomena  of  modern  reli- 
gious hysteria  in  "  Jump-to-Glory  Jane,"  or  so 
well-worn  and  orthodox  a  theme  as  "A  Faith  on 
Trial."  But,  as  generally  happens,  the  real  reli- 
gious significance  of  his  work  lies  implicit  in  his 
treatment  of  many  themes  rather  than  explicit  in 
the  titles  of  a  few. 

Keligion  has  a  keen  ear  for  life's  discords,  but  it 
is  of  the  essence  of  the  Christian  rehgion  to  inter- 
pret them  in  terms  of  possible  harmony.  Its  object 
is  the  doing  of  one  Perfect  Will  on  earth  and  in 
heaven,  and  the  lifting  of  man's  soul  up  to  a  plane 
where  he  shall  be  so  adequate  to  all  circumstance 
as  to  make  even  life's  contradictions  serve  him. 
The  introductory  sonnet  to  "  Modern  Love,"  already 
quoted,  closes  with  three  ungraceful  but  significant 
lines  which  suggest  their  author's  conception  of  this 
truth. 

In  labour  of  the  trouble  at  its  fount, 

Leads  Life  to  an  intelligible  Lord 

The  rebel  discords  up  the  sacred  mount. 

These  rebel  discords  play  a  large  part  in  "  Modern 
Love."  It  is  a  story  of  mutual  suspicion  between 
two  married,  childless,  and  self-centred  lovers,  work- 


466  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ing  to  an  issue  of  tragedy.  Neither  was  deliberately 
unfaithful  to  the  other ;  but  — 

each  applied  to  each  that  fatal  knife, 
Deep  questioning,  which  probes  to  endless  dole. 

Mr.  Meredith  is  himself  passed-master  in  the  use  of 
this  same  knife,  "  deep  questioning  "  ;  yet  with  this 
difference  from  his  brethren  who  boast  of  their  real- 
ism, that  they  so  generally  probe  to  show  their  skill, 
or  from  sheer  professional  satisfaction  in  cutting  — 
even  to  death;  while  he  seems  always  to  have  in 
view  the  true  surgeon's  ideal  of  sounder  and  more 
wholesome  life.  This  confusion  of  good  and  evil 
haunts  all  he  does. 

Ah,  what  a  dusty  answer  gets  the  soul 
When  hot  for  certainties  in  this  our  life !  ^ 

The  real  suffering  and  confusion  to  which  man's 
hearts  and  plans  are  put  by  circumstance  make  up 
life's  tragedy;  the  strange  fashion  by  which  pro- 
gress is  effected  from  year  to  year  in  nature,  and 
from  experience  to  experience  in  man,  constitutes  his 
"  reading  of  earth  "  ;  and  the  frequent  incongruity 
in  all  this  process,  as  beauty  marches  cheek-by-jowl 
with  ugliness,  the  subhme  with  the  ridiculous,  the 
spiritual  with  the  carnal,  suggests  life's  comedy. 
Reference  has  already  been  made  to  "Jump-to- 
Glory  Jane."  It  is  a  title  which  no  other  but  Brown- 
ing would  have  ventured,  and  it  is  doubtful  if  even 
he  could  have  compassed  Meredith's  treatment  of  it. 

»  Modem  Love,  l. 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  467 

The  seizure  of  a  labourer's  widow  by  a  fantastic  re- 
ligious conviction  which  led  her  not  only  to  gro- 
tesque skips  and  hops  upon  her  own  account,  but 
to  the  infection  of  her  neio^hbours  with  the  same 
jumping  habit,  would  have  become,  in  the  hands  of 
most  poets,  a  theme  for  burlesque  treatment  and 
naught  else.  The  opening  stanzas  remind  one  of  the 
late  Mr.  Gilbert's  delectable  Bishop  of  Rum-ti-foo 
in  the  "  Bab  Ballads."  Necessarily  the  comedy  is 
broad;  but  even  the  careless  reader  soon  becomes 
aware  of  an  under-running  view  of  seriousness  and 
sympathy.  Jane,  as  has  been  said,  infected  her  neigh- 
bourhood with  ecstasy;  neither  men  nor  maidens 
were  immune ;  before  the  Vicar's  door  they  leaped 
to  extra  heights  —  but  no  man  could  accuse  them 
of  any  theft;  they  took  to  a  vegetable  diet  and 
slept  in  the  fields  —  but  no  immorality  stained  their 
fervour ;  they  bore  their  testimony  to  a  shrew,  who 
jumped  with  the  rest  —  and  forebore  scolding; 
until,  flying  at  higher  game,  Jane  jumped  before 
the 'Bishop,  who  came  upon  a  visit  to  the  Squire. 
My  Lord  was  naturally  amazed,  and  his  host  scan- 
dalized. They  put  her,  not  unkindly,  from  the  mano- 
rial park,  and  she  jumped  away,  —  to  die  at  last  by 
the  roadside,  in  full  assurance  of  her  peculiar  faith. 

Her  end  was  beautiful :  one  sigh. 

She  jumped  a  foot  when  it  was  nigh. 

A  lily  in  a  linen  clout 

She  looked  when  they  had  laid  her  out. 

It  is  a  lily-light  she  bears 

For  England  up  the  ladder-stairs. 


468  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Mr.  Le  Gallienne  is  reported  to  have  found  a  gos- 
pel in  this  final  stanza  which  almost  converted  him, 
and  is  laughed  at  for  his  pains  by  Mr.  de  Selincourt/ 
who  treats  the  whole  thing  as  pure  fun.  I  venture 
the  assertion  that  both  are  wrong.  "  Jump-to-Glory 
Jane  "  is  no  sermon ;  but  neither  is  it  mere  bur- 
lesque, nor  a  piece  of  Gilbertian  nonsense.  It  is 
Meredith's  characteristic  testimony  to  the  Comic 
Spirit's  breadth  of  sympathy ;  his  recognition  of  the 
intimate  relation  between  laughter  and  tears  ;  of  the 
marvel  of  life's  incongruities ;  and  of  the  vitality  of 
a  religious  instinct  which  persists,  not  only  in  spite 
of,  but  perhaps  by  means  of,  the  formality  of  aproned 
bishops  and  the  fanaticism  of  Jumping  Janes. 

It  is  a  somewhat  less  confident  answer  that  Mr. 
Swinburne  returns  to  the  three  questions  just  pro- 
pounded to  Mr.  Meredith,  as  to  the  scope  of  his 
work,  the  clearness  of  his  vision,  and  the  depth  of 
his  experience.  So  far  as  the  amount  of  his  poetry 
is  concerned,  there  can  be  no  doubt  of  his  claim  to 
a  chief  place  in  our  choir;  but  it  is  to  be  remembered 
that  "Festus  "  Bailey —  on  whom  be  peace !  — was 
prolific,  and  that  Mr.  George  Barlow's  published 
works  run,  and  very  musically  too,  to  more  than  fif- 
teen volumes.  Few  poets  in  any  age  have,  however, 
had  Mr.  Swinburne's  excuse  for  voluminous  writing ; 
and  it  might  be  reasonably  maintained  that  no  Eng- 
lish poet  has  ever  shown  such  complete  and  natural 
mastery  of  lyric  metres,  and  of  the  language  whose 
»  In  Mrs.  M.  S.  Henderson's  George  Meredith,  p.  220. 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  469 

•wealth  they  were,  in  his  hands,  not  only  to  exhibit 
but  to  enhance.  This  is  not  to  say  that  his  lyric  gift 
is  richer  or  choicer  than  Shelley's,  or  that  his  crafts- 
manship is  equal  to  Tennyson's ;  it  is  simply  to  give 
him  due  credit  for  the  possession  of  transcendent 
powers  as  a  Lord  of  Speech.  It  would  be  too  much  to 
ask  that  his  song  should  have  the  haunting  ^  spirit- 
ual '  quality  of  Shelley's ;  or  that  its  form  should 
undergo  the  drastic  self-criticism  to  which  Tenny- 
son's was  subjected.  We  are  content  that  he  sings, 
and  with  such  melody  and  grace  as  to  disarm  us  when 
we  say  that  he  sings  too  much.  Sure  of  the  fact 
though  the  critic  may  be,  he  falls  into  confusion 
and  begins  to  think  criticism  a  rather  poor  and  un- 
worthy business  when  asked  to  say  what  songs  he 
would  wish  away.  Furthermore,  it  is  to  be  said  in 
Mr.  Swinburne'sbehalf  that  he  respects  the  medium 
in  which  he  works.  English  is  his  servant,  to  be  sure ; 
but  he  exalts  it  to  the  place  of  friend.  If  he  spend 
its  resources  somewhat  extravagantly  at  times,  that 
is  because  he  sees  as  few  have  ever  seen  what  those 
resources  are.  He  loves,  and  doubtless  loves  too  well, 
to  exhibit  its  charms ;  but  he  refrains  from  compel- 
ling it  to  the  playing  of  mere  pranks.  Any  one  who 
has,  in  an  exhibition  of  trained  beasts,  seen  the  grave 
might  of  an  elephant,  or  the  splendid  grace  of  a 
tiger,  subdued  to  the  performance  of  curious  and 
pitiful  tricks,  has  passed  his  own  judgement  upon 
one  of  the  most  serious  blemishes  in  the  work  of 
Browning  and  Meredith.  Widely  to  change  the  fig- 


470  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

ure,  their  treatment  of  their  mother  tongue  at  times 
not  only  threatens  parricide,  but  parricide  by  torture. 

As  a  master  of  poetry's  form  and  music  Swin- 
burne's place  is,  then,  not  only  secure  but  high.  It 
is  when  we  proceed  to  test  the  field  of  his  vision,  the 
width  of  his  sympathy,  and  his  ability  to  sound  the 
depths  of  man's  experience,  that  our  answers  grow 
less  confident  and  positive.  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  has 
somewhere  characterized  the  poetry  of  Swinburne's 
early  prime  as  directed  chiefly  against  God,  priests, 
and  kings. 

As  to  the  portion  of  it  which  seems  to  be  directed 
against  God,  all  that  needs  to  be  said  was  crowded 
generations  ago  into  the  single  sentence, — 

He  that  sitteth  in  the  heavens  shall  laugh. 

The  divinities  that  aspiring  poets  overthrow  may  be 
necessary  to  literature ;  but  they  bear  very  much 
the  same  relation  to  life  as  do  the  plaster  casts 
copied  by  art  classes  in  our  schools  for  young  la- 
dies, —  they  are  fragile  things,  serving  art's  hum- 
bler needs,  and  not  greatly  missed  when  broken  in 
the  process. 

Against  priests  and  kings,  so  ardent  a  republican 
as  Mr.  Swinburne  makes  out  a  better  case.  He  states 
it  of  course  with  characteristic  exaggeration,  but 
there  can  be  no  question  of  his  sincerity  in  enter- 
ing the  lists  on  behalf  of  intellectual  and  political 
liberty.  There  is  a  distinctly  religious  element  in  such 
championship,  as  he  might  have  learned,  had  he 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  471 

chosen,  from  Mazzini,  whom  he  greatly  admired ; 
and  I  shall  presently  have  occasion  to  show  that  the 
social  consciousness  of  the  last  half -century  is  one  of 
the  many  forms  in  which  religion  expresses  itself, 
and,  of  all  the  guises  assumed  by  Christianity,  the 
one  perhaps  most  characteristic  of  the  day.  Some- 
thing of  man's  solidarity  and  of  society's  need  Swin- 
burne has  felt  deeply  and  expressed  with  power;  but 
the  main  characteristics  of  his  verse  beyond  those 
already  mentioned  may  be  said  to  be  pretty  frankly 
pagan.  His  love  of  merely  sensuous  beauty  in  word 
and  thing,  and  his  content  to  rest  in  graceful  forms 
of  thought  without  much  inquiry  as  to  the  substance 
behind  them,  disappoint  the  reader's  mind  even 
while  his  ears  are  charmed  with  the  melody.  We 
bear  with  Meredith's  roughness  because  of  our  faith 
in  some  underlying  harmony  of  thought  which  shall 
resolve  it.  We  delight  in  Swinburne's  melody,  only 
in  too  many  cases  to  experience  a  feeling  of  revul- 
sion at  a  lack,  not  merely  of  harmony,  but  of  any 
real  substance  to  harmonize.  Take  for  instance  the 
two  wonderful  and  characteristic  poems,  "Aholi- 
bah  "  and  "  The  Masque  of  Queen  Bersabe."  The 
latter  is  a  miracle-play  in  which,  with  a  delicious 
simplicity.  King  David  and  Nathan  quote  scraps 
of  Latin,  while  one  of  the  soldiers  swears  "by 
Mahound"  and  another  by  the  head  of  St.  Paul. 
Finally  the  great  queens  of  love  who  have  lived  in 
history  and  legend,  Herodias,  Aholibah,  Cleopatra, 
Azubah,  and  the  rest,  "  all  that  were  fair  and  foul," 


472  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

are  summoned  by  Nathan ;  they  come  and  each 
bears  testimony  to  her  own  beauty,  after  this  man- 
ner:— 

"  I  am  the  Queen  Hesione. 
The  seasons  that  increased  in  me 

Made  my  face  fairer  than  all  men's. 
I  had  the  summer  in  my  hair ; 
And  all  the  pale  gold  autumn  air 

Was  as  the  habit  of  my  sense. 
My  body  was  as  fire  that  shone ; 
God's  beauty  that  makes  all  things  one 

Was  one  among  my  hand-maidens." 

Their  testimony  and  the  knowledge  of  God's 
judgement  on  them  smites  Bathsheba  with  fear,  and 
leads  David,  not  to  repentance,  but  to  a  justifica- 
tion of  his  conduct  which  is  one  of  the  curiosities 
of  literature.  As  a  miracle-masque  the  whole  thing 
is  admirably  done ;  and  yet  here,  as  in  the  kindred 
poem  '^  Aholibah,"  and  in  "  Laus  Veneris,"  there  is 
such  involution  and  redundance  of  the  sensuous  that 
one  is  tempted  to  judge  Mr.  Swinburne  out  of  Mr. 
Meredith's  mouth.  "  I  seem  to  be  instructed  in  one 
of  the  mysteries  of  erotic  esotery,  yet  on  my  word 
I  am  no  wiser,"  cried  pompous  Dr.  Middleton, 
plagued  with  his  daughter's  love-affairs,  in  "  The 
Egoist."  The  ponderous  phrase  recurs  as  one  reads 
Swinburne's  most  characteristic  work.  He  is  fasci- 
nated with  the  mystery  of  ''  erotic  esotery,"  and  of 
all  English  poets  succeeds  in  enduing  it  with  the 
most  exquisite  grace;  but  it  remains  a  grace  of 
body,  —  there  is  little  soul. 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  473 

There  are,  to  be  sure,  passages  like  the  speech 
of  St.  Dorothy,  beginning,  — 

Christ  King,  fail*  Christ,  that  knowest  all  men's  wit 
And  all  the  feeble  fashion  of  my  ways,  — 

"which  indicate  how  great  an  interpreter  of  the  heart 
he  might  have  become,  had  he  chosen.  With  stead- 
fast perversity,  however,  he  has  kept  the  path 
marked  out  in  his  "  Hymn  to  Proserpine : "  — 

Thou  hast  conquered,  O  pale  Galilean ;  the  world  has  grown 

grey  from  thy  breath ; 
We  have  drunken  of  things  Lethean,  and  fed  on  the  fulness 

of  death. 

Again  he  recurs  to  the  same  thought  in  another 
poem,  "  Pilgrims,"  — 

We  have  drunken  of  Lethe  at  last,  we  have  eaten  of  Lotus ; 

What  hurts  it  us  here  that  sorrows  are  born  and  die  ? 
We  have  said  to  the  dream  that  caressed  and  the  dread  that 
smote  us, 

Good-night  and  good-bye. 

This  is  not  the  stuff  whereof  great  poetry  is  made, 
though  it  lends  itself  perfectly  to  the  adornment 
of  a  kind  of  hectic  beauty.  It  is  a  pleasure  to  con- 
trast with  it  Mr.  Swinburne's  wholesome  love  of  the 
sea  and  his  treatment  of  its  moods ;  the  generous 
though  often  exaggerated  criticism  to  be  found  in 
his  essays;  and  much  that  he  has  said  in  behalf  of 
liberty;  yet  the  fact  remains  that  his  sympathy 
scarcely  reaches  to  some  of  the  most  human  of  ex- 
periences, and  he  fails  to  sound  the  depths  of  those 
which  it  does  touch.     He  recognizes  religion  and 


474  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

makes  much  of  the  material  it  offers ;  but  his  per- 
sistent attempt  to  pose  as  a  pagan,  smacks  of  some- 
thing so  like  affectation  as  to  rob  much  of  his  best 
work  of  half  its  power  and  assurance  of  immortality. 

It  is  almost  with  relief,  therefore,  that  we  turn 
from  the  melodious  but  not  quite  natural  paganism 
of  Mr.  Swinburne,  in  which  despair  lies  latent,  to 
the  utterly  sincere  pessimism  of  James  Thomson 
and  "  The  City  of  Dreadful  Night."  Thomson  was 
a  friend  of  the  late  Mr.  Bradlaugh.  He  began  life 
as  a  regimental  schoolmaster,  and  sustained  it  by 
more  or  less  fitful  employment  in  journalism  and 
business.  Opium,  alcohol,  and  insomnia  played  their 
sorry  parts  in  it,  and  the  end  came  in  University 
College  Hospital  in  1882,  while  Thomson  was  in  his 
forty-eighth  year.  "The  City  of  Dreadful  Night" 
was  published  in  1874,  and  was  so  little  known,  or 
else  so  speedily  forgotten,  that  when  a  few  years 
ago  an  enterprising  publisher  attempted,  without 
their  author's  permission,  to  reprint  some  of  Mr. 
Kipling's  fugitive  newspaper  articles  relating  to 
Calcutta,  he  chose  this  same  title,  apparently  un- 
aware that  it  had  been  appropriated ;  so  wilHng  is 
the  world  to  let  that  which  has  a  manifest  savour 
of  death  in  it  go  to  its  own  place,  however  brilHant 
its  conception  and  execution  may  be. 

The  City  of  Dreadful  Night  is  the  abode  of 
Melancholia,  —  a  city  vast  and  sombre,  lying  beside 
a  tideless  sea,  nobly  built,  well  inhabited,  but  upon 
which  no  sun  ever  rises.    Its  life,  Prometheus-like, 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  475 

IS  always  renewed,  and  always  eaten  out  by  quench- 
less sorrow.  In  the  Proem,  with  its  text  from  Leo- 
pardi,  the  poet  tells  us  why  he  wrote :  — 

Why  break  the  seals  of  mute  despair  unbidden, 
And  wail  life's  discords  into  careless  ears  ? 

Because  a  cold  rage  seizes  one  at  whiles 

To  show  the  bitter,  old,  and  wrinkled  truth 
Stripped  naked  of  all  vesture  that  beguiles, 

False  dreams,  false  hopes,  false  masks  and  modes  of  youth ; 
Because  it  gives  some  sense  of  power  and  passion 
In  helpless  impotence  to  try  to  fashion 

Our  woe  in  living  words,  howe'er  uncouth. 

The  traveller  enters  the  City,  and  passes  up  and 
down  its  streets,  following  one  who  seems  intent  on 
some  sad  errand.  This  proves  to  be  a  pilgrimage 
to  the  ruined  shrines  of  Faith,  Love,  and  Hope. 
Here  Faith  was  poisoned,  there  Love  died  by  vio- 
lence, and  yonder  Hope  starved.  The  seeming  de- 
spair of  his  guide  moves  him  to  question  :  — 

*'  When  Faith  and  Love  and  Hope  are  dead  indeed, 
Can  Life  still  live  ?  By  what  doth  it  proceed  ?  " 

As  whom  his  one  intense  thought  overpowers, 
He  answered  coldly,  "  Take  a  watch,  erase 

The  signs  and  figures  of  the  circling  hours, 
Detach  the  hands,  remove  the  dial-face ; 

The  works  proceed  until  run  down  ;  although 

Bereft  of  purpose,  void  of  use,  still  go." 

He  circled  thus  forever  tracing  out 

The  series  of  the  fraction  left  of  life ; 
Perpetual  recurrence  in  the  scope 
Of  but  three  terms,  dead  Faith,  dead  Love,  dead  Hope. 


476  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

This  last  reference  is,  of  course,  to  the  fantastic 
mathematical  formula  of  pessimism,  obtained  by- 
dividing  threescore  and  ten  by  the  persistently  re- 
curring Three:  that  is  by  33.3,  representing  the 
years  of  a  generation,  or  by  333,  representing,  as 
in  the  poem,  dead  Faith,  Hope,  and  Love;  the 
quotient  in  either  case  resulting  in  an  infinite 
series  of  the  figures  2,  1,  0. 

The  City  lays  its  charm  upon  its  visitor :  — 

Poor  wretch !  who  once  hath  paced  that  dolent  city 
Shall  pace  it  often  doomed  beyond  all  pity, 
With  horror  ever  deepening  from  the  first. 

All  this,  however,  is  but  the  outward  seeming  of 
the  City's  life.  The  visitor  soon  becomes  aware  of  a 
throng  in  the  streets  pressing  toward  what  appears 
to  be  a  cathedral ;  and  there  he  hears  its  philosophy 
expounded.  The  great  church  is  a  splendid  habita- 
tion of  gloom,  wherein  a  vast  multitude  hang  wist- 
fully upon  an  earnest  preacher's  lips,  if  haply  he 
will  show  them  any  good.  This  is  his  introduc- 
tion :  — 

"  O  melancholy  Brothers,  dark,  dark,  dark. 
O  battling  in  black  floods  without  an  ark  ! 

O  spectral  wanderers  of  unholy  Night ! 
My  soul  hath  bled  for  you  these  sunless  years, 
With  bitter  blood-drops  running  down  like  tears ; 

O  dark,  dark,  dark,  withdrawn  from  joy  and  light.*' 

Then  follows  the  doctrine :  — 

"  And  now  at  last  authentic  word  I  bring. 
Witnessed  by  every  dead  and  living  thing ; 
Good  tidings  of  great  joy  for  you,  for  all : 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  477 

There  is  no  God ;  no  fiend  with  names  divine 
Made  us  and  tortures  us ;  if  we  must  pine, 
It  is  to  satiate  no  Being's  gall. 

"  I  find  no  hint  throughout  the  universe 
Of  good  or  ill,  of  blessing  or  of  curse ; 

I  find  alone  Necessity  supreme  ; 
With  infinite  mystery,  abysmal,  dark, 
Unlighted  ever  by  the  faintest  spark, 

For  us  the  flitting  shadows  of  a  dream." 

And  here  is  his  application :  — 

"  O  Brothers  of  sad  lives !  they  are  so  brief ; 
A  few  short  years  must  bring  us  all  relief ; 

Can  we  not  bear  these  years  of  labouring  breath  ? 
But  if  you  would  not  this  poor  life  fulfill, 
Lo,  you  are  free  to  end  it  when  you  will, 
Without  the  fear  of  waking  after  death." 

Here  a  lamentable  voice  was  raised  from  among 
the  congregation  in  confirmation  of  the  preacher's 
message,  although  between  the  words  of  every 
sentence  of  it  there  sounded  the  inappeasable 
human  desire  for  comfort.  It  closes  thus :  — 

"  Speak  not  of  comfort  where  no  comfort  is. 

Speak  not  at  all :  can  words  make  foul  things  fair  ? 
Our  life 's  a  cheat,  our  death  a  black  abyss : 
Hush  and  be  mute,  envisaging  despair." 

And  this  the  preacher  in  his  turn  reaffirms:  — 

"  My  Brothers,  my  poor  Brothers,  it  is  thus : 
This  life  holds  nothing  good  for  us. 

But  it  ends  soon  and  nevermore  can  be ; 
And  we  knew  nothing  of  it  ere  our  birth 
And  shall  know  nothing  when  consigned  to  earth  ; 

I  ponder  these  thoughts  and  they  comfort  me." 


478  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

This  is  the  philosophy  of  the  City  of  Dreadful 
Night,  and  the  poem  leaves  us  without  the  city 
gates,  beside  the  giant  statue  of  its  genius,  Melan- 
cholia. 

The  moving  sun  and  stars  from  east  to  west 

Circle  before  her  in  the  sea  of  air ; 
Shadows  and  gleams  glide  round  her  solemn  rest. 

Her  subjects  often  gaze  upon  her  there : 
The  strong  to  drink  new  strength  of  iron  endurance, 
The  weak  new  terrors ;  all,  renewed  assurance 

And  confirmation  of  the  old  despair. 

It  is  needless  to  point  out  the  literary  value  to 
this  true  poet  of  his  religious  theme ;  but  it  seems 
worth  while  to  set  in  contrast  with  it  the  words  of 
another  poet  picturing  a  widely  different  city. 

"  And  I,  John,  saw  the  holy  city,  new  Jerusalem, 
coming  down  from  God  out  of  heaven,  prepared 
as  a  bride  adorned  for  her  husband.  And  I  heard 
a  great  voice  out  of  heaven  saying,  Behold,  the 
tabernacle  of  God  is  with  men,  and  he  will  dwell 
with  them,  and  they  shall  be  his  people,  and  God 
himself  shall  be  with  them,  and  be  their  God.  And 
God  shall  wipe  away  all  tears  from  their  eyes ;  and 
there  shall  be  no  more  death,  neither  sorrow  nor 
crying,  neither  shall  there  be  any  more  pain:  for 
the  former  things  are  passed  away." 

Before  leaving  Thomson,  it  is  worth  while  to 
notice  the  resultant  attitude  of  his  philosophy 
toward  Nature.  One  passage  in  the  poem  called 
"Vane's   Story"  will   illustrate  my  meaning,  al- 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  479 

though  due  allowance  must  be  made  for  its  jocose 
bitterness.  Vane  speaks :  — 

"  For  I  am  infinitely  tired 
With  this  old  sphere  we  once  admired, 
With  this  old  earth  we  loved  too  well, 
And  would  not  mind  a  change  of  Hell. 
The  same  old  stolid  hills  and  leas, 
The  same  old  stupid,  patient  trees. 
The  same  old  ocean,  blue  and  green, 
The  same  sky,  cloudy  or  serene ; 
The  old  two-dozen  hours  to  run 
Between  the  settings  of  the  sun, 
The  same  three  hundred  sixty-five 
Dull  days  to  every  year  alive ; 
Old  stingy  measure,  weight,  and  rule, 
No  margin  left  to  play  the  fool ; 
The  same  old  way  of  getting  born 
Into  it,  naked  and  forlorn ; 
The  same  old  way  of  creeping  out 
Through  death's  low  door,  for  lean  and  stout." 

I  have  felt  justified  in  giving  this  important  place 
to  Thomson,  because  scarce  any  one  else  has  so 
eloquently  expressed  the  philosophical  conclusion 
of  a  pure  Necessitarianism,  when  once  its  influ- 
ences have  oozed  down  into  the  stratum  of  life's 
commonplace. 

An  interesting  variant  of  the  same  general  type 
is  to  be  found  in  John  Davidson's  ^'Ballad  in 
Blank  Verse,"  which  portrays  the  experience  of  a 
rather  sensual  young  Scotsman  whose  parents  are 
deeply  concerned  for  his  spiritual  welfare,  and 
who  plead  with  him.  His  father  speaks :  — 


480  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"  My  son,  reject  not  Christ ;  he  pleads  through  me ; 
The  Holy  Spirit  uses  my  poor  words. 
How  would  it  fill  your  mother's  heart  and  mine 
And  God's  great  heart  with  joy  unspeakable, 
Were  you,  a  helpless  sinner,  now  to  cry, 
*  Lord,  I  believe ;  help  thou  my  unbelief.*  " 

But  the  boy,  whose  blood  — 

fulfilled 
Of  brine,  of  sunset,  and  his  dreams,  exhaled 
A  vision, 

would  not  hear.  He  broke  his  mother's  heart,  and 
then,  to  please  his  father  and  if  possible  to  atone 
for  the  past,  professed  conversion  and  came  to  the 
Lord's  Table  with  him.  We  cannot  follow  the 
tragedy  in  detail.  He  finds  — 

like  husks  of  corn 
The  bread,  like  vitriol  the  sip  of  wine  ! 
I  eat  and  drink  damnation  to  myself 
To  give  my  father's  troubled  spirit  peace. 

Of  course  he  ends  by  renouncing  all  that  he  has 
confessed,  shouting  forth  in  one  breath  his  deter- 
mination to  have  no  creed,  and  in  the  next  his  ac- 
ceptance of  a  creed  compact  of  pantheism  and  posi- 
tivism, and  concludes  with  the  determination  to  be 
a  poet,  finding  comfort  and  inspiration  in  Nature. 

"  No  creed  for  me !  I  am  a  man  apart : 
A  mouthpiece  for  the  creeds  of  all  the  world. 
A  soulless  life  that  angels  may  possess 
Or  demons  haunt,  wherein  the  foulest  things 
May  loll  at  ease  beside  the  loveliest ; 
A  martjrr  for  all  mundane  moods  to  tear ; 
The  slave  of  every  passion." 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  481 

This  "  Ballad  in  Blank  Verse  "  is  less  logically 
complete  than  the  "City  of  Dreadful  Night."  It 
states  the  premisses,  but  forbears  to  draw  Thom- 
son's bitter  conclusion.  One  feels  in  reading  it, 
however,  that  hopelessness  waits  at  the  end  of  the 
story,  even  though  the  concluding  chapters  be  yet 
unwritten. 

It  was  to  be  expected  that  the  social  problem  in 
its  varied  ramifications  would  prove  a  fruitful  theme 
for  the  more  serious  of  the  minor  poets.  Crabbe  and 
Goldsmith  gave  the  eighteenth  century  some  little 
foretaste  of  it;  Hood  grew  sentimental  over  it; 
Kingsley  shocked  his  comfortable  age  into  at  least 
thinking  of  it  between  whiles :  but  about  all  these 
there  was  a  suggestion  of  the  reformer.  There  was 
something  of  the  teacher,  not  to  say  of  the  preacher, 
in  their  manner.  It  remained  for  the  poets  of  the 
present  generation  to  state  the  bald  factors  of  the 
question  with  a  bitterness  of  realism  that  sometimes 
scoffs  at  the  problem  as  a  whole,  and  treats  the  re- 
flection of  its  painful  elements  as  an  end  of  art  in 
itself.  Not  from  the  tragedy  of  life  as  a  soul-stirring 
thing,  but  rather  from  its  dulness,  pallor,  sorrow, 
and  bitter  monotony,  have  some  of  the  truest  artists 
drawn  their  inspiration.  Take,  for  instance,  John 
Davidson's  "  A  Northern  Suburb  :  "  — 

Roused  by  the  fee'd  policeman's  knock, 
And  sad  that  day  should  come  again, 

Under  the  stars  the  workmen  flock 
In  haste  to  reach  the  morning  train. 


482  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

For  here  dwell  those  who  must  fulfil 
Dull  tasks  in  uncongenial  spheres, 

Who  toil  through  dread  of  coming  ill, 
And  not  with  hope  of  happier  years. 

The  lowly  folk  who  scarcely  dare 

Conceive  themselves  perhaps  misplaced, 

Whose  prize  for  unremitting  care 
Is  only  not  to  be  disgraced. 

The  same  theme  is  dealt  with  by  A.  Mary  F. 
Robinson,  Madame  Darmesteter,  in  her  "  New  Ar- 
cadia," but  with  a  distinct  recognition  of  its  ethical 
side. 

Others  shall  learn  and  shudder  and  sorrow  and  know 

What  shame  is  in  the  world  they  will  not  see. 
They  cover  it  up  with  leaves,  they  make  a  show 

Of  Maypole  garlands  over,  but  there  shall  be 
A  wind  to  scatter  their  gauds,  and  a  wind  to  blow 

And  purify  the  hidden,  dreaded  thing 

Festering  underneath  ;  and  so  I  sing. 

Yet  she  is  far  from  disregarding  the  extremely  com- 
plicated nature  of  the  problem,  as  is  shown  in  the 
"  Scapegoat,"  where  she  tells  the  story  of  a  beauti- 
ful child  who  grew  up  in  wretched  surroundings  to 
develop  a  miserable  life. 

Yet  now  when  I  watch  her  pass  with  a  heavy  reel, 

Shouting  her  villanous  song. 
Is  it  only  pity  or  shame,  do  you  think,  that  I  feel 

For  the  infinite  sorrow  and  wrong  ? 

With  a  sick,  strange  wonder  I  ask,  Who  shall  answer  the  sin, 

Thou,  lover,  brothers  of  thine  ? 
Or  he  who  left  standing  the  hovel  to  perish  in  ? 

Or  I ;  who  gave  no  sign  ? 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  483 

All  things  considered,  however,  I  am  inclined  to 
think  that  John  Davidson  has  given  at  once  the 
grimmest  and  most  searching  statement  of  one 
phase  of  the  ever-present  question  in  his  poem  en- 
titled "  Thirty  Bob  a  Week/'  in  which  a  London 
clerk  opens  his  heart  concerning  his  struggle  to 
live  upon  a  weekly  wage  of  thirty  shillings,  and  ex- 
pounds something  of  the  philosophy  to  which  that 
struggle  has  led  him.  The  Clerk  says ; — 

"  I  face  the  music,  sir  ;  you  bet  I  ain't  a  car ; 
Strike  me  lucky  if  I  don't  believe  I  *m  lost ! 

"  For  like  a  mole  I  journey  in  the  dark, 

A-travelling  along  the  underground 
From  my  Pillar'd  Halls  and  broad  Suburbean  Park, 

To  come  the  daily,  dull,  official  round  ; 
And  home  again  at  night,  with  my  pipe  all  alight, 

A-scheming  how  to  count  ten  bob  a  pound. 

"  And  it 's  often  very  cold  and  very  wet, 

And  my  misses  stitches  towels  for  a  hunks ; 

And  the  Pillar'd  Hall  is  half  of  it  to  let  — 

Three  rooms  about  the  size  of  travelling  trunks. 

And  we  cough,  my  wife  and  I,  to  dislocate  a  sigh, 
When  the  noisy  little  kids  are  in  their  bunks." 

Then  he  goes  on  to  say:  — 

"  So  p'r'aps  we  are  in  Hell,  for  all  that  I  can  tell, 
And  lost  and  damn'd  and  served  up  hot  to  God. 

"  I  ain't  blaspheming,  Mr.  Silver-tongue ; 
I  'm  saying  things  a  bit  beyond  your  art : 
Of  all  the  rummy  starts  you  ever  sprung, 
Thirty  bob  a  week  's  the  rummiest  start ! 
With  your  science  and  your  books, 
And  your  theories  about  spooks, 
Did  you  ever  think  of  looking  in  your  heart  ? 


484  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

"I  didn't  mean  your  pocket,  Mr.,  no; 

I  mean  that  having  children  and  a  wife,  * 
With  thirty  bob  on  which  to  come  and  go, 
Is  n't  dancing  to  the  tabor  and  the  fife : 
When  it  does  n't  make  you  drink, 
By  Heaven !  it  makes  you  think, 
And  notice  curious  items  about  life. 

**  It 's  a  naked  child  against  a  hungry  wolf  ; 

It 's  playing  bowls  upon  a  splitting  wreck ; 
It 's  walking  on  a  string  across  a  gulf 

With  mill-stones  fore-and-aft  about  your  neck ; 
But  the  thing  is  daily  done  by  many  and  many  a  one. 

And  we  fall,  face  forward,  fighting,  on  the  deck.'* 

It  is  doubtful  if  the  bitter  monotonies  of  life,  its 
grim  realities  of  poverty,  anxiety,  and  suffering,  its 
sordid  necessities  even,  ever  before  found  so  large 
place  in  the  material  which  is  wrought  over  by  the 
highest  art  into  poetry.  The  age  seems  to  have 
awakened  to  a  new  sense  of  the  influence  of  envi- 
ronment upon  philosophy,  and  there  is  a  note  of 
insistence  in  the  "  Why  "  which  the  world  of  toil- 
ing poor  is  always  uttering,  that  meets  quick  re- 
sponse from  the  poet. 

The  question  is  worth  raising,  whether  this  con- 
stant contemplation  of  life's  sordidness  may  not 
account  in  some  degree  for  the  growing  love  of 
the  cynical  and  the  grim  which  has  been  so  mani- 
fest during  the  last  score  of  years.  Poetry  has  gone 
out  of  its  way  to  collect  and  interpret  the  night- 
mares of  folk-lore  and  folk-song.  A  typical  instance 
of  this  endeavour  is  to  be  found  in  Alma  Strettel 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  486 

and  Carmen  Sylva's  "Bard  of  the  Dimbo-Vitza." 
It  is  an  anthology  of  Koumanian  folk-songs,  of 
which  the  little  poem  called  "  The  Comforters  "  is 
as  typical  and  familiar  as  any. 

My  father  is  dead  and  his  cap  is  mine, 
His  cap  of  fur  and  his  leathern  belt  — 

Mine,  too,  his  knives. 
When  I  fall  asleep,  when  I  slumbering  lie, 
Then  the  knives  spring  forth,  from  their  sheaths  they  fly 

And  roam  the  fields. 
I  know  not  whither  the  knives  have  strayed, 

But  when  morning  dawns,  at  my  window-pane 
I  hear  a  tapping  —  I  fling  it  wide, 

And  there  are  my  knives  come  home  again. 
"  Where  have  ye  been  ?  '*  I  ask  them  then, 
And  they  make  reply :  "  In  the  hearts  of  men ! 
There  was  one  so  sick  for  love  and  torn  — 

We  healed  its  wound  ; 
And  another  was  weary  and  travel-worn  — 

We  gave  it  rest. 
For  dear  to  us  are  the  hearts  of  men, 

And  dear  their  blood  ; 
We  drink  it  as  furrows  drink  the  rain, 
Then  tapping  come  to  thy  window-pane : 
Make  way  for  thy  knives,  they  have  done  their  work ; 
Now  wipe  the  blood  with  thy  sleeve  away  — 
Thy  sleeve  with  the  dusk-red,  broidered  flowers  — 
And  wash  the  sleeve  in  the  river  clean. 
Then  thrust  us  once  more  our  sheaths  between, 

The  sheaths  on  the  leathern  belt !  " 

The  defiant  attitude  toward  Fate  was  character- 
istic of  the  late  W.  E.  Henley.  Sometimes  this  is 
nobly  put,  as  in  his  famous  verses  "  To  R.  T.  H.  B." 


486  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Out  of  the  night  that  covers  me, 
Black  as  the  pit  from  pole  to  pole, 

I  thank  whatever  gods  may  be 
For  my  unconquerable  soul. 

But  he  contradicts  himself  in  such  lines  as  those 
quoted  at  the  close  of  last  chapter :  — 

Let  us  be  drunk,  and  for  a  while  forget/ 
Forget,  and  ceasing  even  from  regret, 
Live  without  reason  and  in  spite  of  rhyme. 

This  note  of  defiance,  however,  rarely  persists  in 
poetry,  since  it  is  essentially  inharmonious;  and 
even  in  the  poetry  of  unbelief  it  tends  to  fade  into 
plaintiveness. 

Mr.  William  Vaughn  Moody,  in  his  "Fire- 
Bringer,"  describes  the  singing  of  Pandora  to  the 
yet  soulless  creatures  that  sprang  from  the  stones 
and  clods  thrown  by  Deukalion  and  Pyrrha  to  re- 
people  the  earth  after  the  flood.  It  was  — 

a  doubtful  song, 
Its  meaning  faint  or  none,  but  mingled  up 
Of  all  that  nests  and  housekeeps  in  the  heart. 
Or  puts  out  in  lone  passion  toward  the  vast 
And  cannot  choose  but  go. 

There  was  a  beauty  in  its  very  wistfulness;  and 
there  is  a  similar  mingling  of  sweetness  and  shadow 
in  much  of  the  most  melodious  recent  English  verse. 
Hear  Mr.  Rolleston  of  the  Rhymers'  Club,  for 
instance,  sighing  for  Nirvana. 

For  others,  Lord,  Thy  purging  fires, 
The  loves  reknit,  the  crown,  the  palm. 

For  me  the  death  of  all  desires 
In  deep,  eternal  calm. 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  487 

Mr.  G.  A.  Greene  is  less  easily  reconciled. 

They  have  taken  away  my  Lord ; 

They  have  shattered  the  one  great  Hope, 

They  have  left  us  alone  to  cope 
With  our  terrible  selves :  .  .  . 

The  strength  of  immortal  love  ; 

The  Comfort  of  millions  that  weep ; 

Prayer  and  the  Cross  we  adored  — 
All  is  lost !  There  is  no  one  above  ; 

We  are  left  like  the  beasts  that  creep  — 

They  have  taken  away  my  Lord. 

Mr.  Austin  Dobson,  who  generally  eschews  the- 
ology in  his  graceful  verses,  has  however  furnished 
an  admirable  illustration  of  this  same  restiveness 
under  a  scheme  of  things  which  starves  the  soul  or 
denies  its  rights,  in  his  "  Prayer  of  the  Swine  to 
Circe."  These  are,  of  course,  the  companions  of 
Ulysses  changed  by  magic  into  swinish  shape  and 
condemned  to  live  as  swine ;  but  with  men's  hearts 
still  beating  in  them,  and  mocked  at  every  turn  by 
human  longing  and  aspiration. 

"  If  swine  we  be  —  if  we  indeed  be  swine, 

Daughter  of  Pers^,  make  us  swine  indeed, 
Well-pleased  on  litter-straw  to  lie  supine, 

Well-pleased  on  mast  and  acorn-shales  to  feed, 
Stirred  by  all  instincts  of  the  bestial  breed ; 

But  O  Unmerciful !  O  Pitiless ! 
Leave  us  not  thus  with  sick  men's  hearts  to  bleed. 

To  waste  long  days  in  yearning,  dumb  distress 
And  memory  of  things  gone,  and  utter  hopelessness." 

The  illustrations  of  literature's  debt  to  faith^ 


488  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

both  in  its  victories  and  its  defeats,  throng  upon  the 
memory  in  such  multitudes  as  almost  to  compel  too 
lavish  quotation.  Impatience  with  the  accepted  esti- 
mate of  Old  Testament  characters  and  their  deeds 
seems  to  have  inspired  a  very  notable  poem  in  Lord 
de  Tabley's  "  Jael";  Mr.  W.  S.  Blunt's  group  of 
sonnets  upon  his  own  imprisonment  begins  daringly 
enough,  — 

"  From  Caiaphas  to  Pilate  was  I  sent " ; 

a  selection  from  the  poems  of  the  late  J.  A.  Sy- 
monds  is  introduced  by  his  Hues  upon  *^The 
Temptation  in  the  Wilderness  " ;  and  it  is  doubtful 
if  Robert  Buchanan  ever  did  more  memorable  work 
than  is  to  be  found  in  his  "Ballad  of  Judas 
Iscariot."  The  problem  which  Death  propounds  to 
Life  also  haunts  poetry  to-day  as  persistently  as 
ever ;  and  the  three  quotations  which  follow  sug- 
gest three  diverse  approaches  to  it.  The  first  is  the 
stanza  already  quoted  from  Mrs.  Meynell's  "To 
the  Beloved  Dead  " :  — 

Beloved,  thou  art  like  a  tune  that  idle  fingers 

Play  on  a  window-pane. 
The  time  is  there,  the  form  of  music  lingers ; 

But  O,  thou  sweetest  strain, 
Where  is  thy  soul  ?  Thou  liest  i'  the  wind  and  rain. 

Here  the  sorrow  verges  on  despair.  In  Mr.  C.  G.  D. 
Roberts'  "Falling  Leaves  "  the  wistfulness  remains, 
but  it  has  grown  more  restful,  as  though  touched 
at  least  with  the  finger-tip  of  Faith. 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  489 

Lightly  He  blows,  and  at  His  breath  they  fall, 

The  perishing  kindreds  of  the  leaves ;  they  drift, 
Spent  flames  of  scarlet,  gold  aerial, 

Across  the  hollow  year,  noiseless  and  swift. 
Lightly  He  blows,  and  countless  as  the  falling 

Of  snow  by  night  upon  a  solemn  sea. 
The  ages  circle  down  beyond  recalling, 

To  strew  the  hollows  of  Eternity. 
He  sees  them  drifting  through  the  spaces  dim, 

And  leaves  and  ages  are  as  one  to  Him.^ 

Francis  Thompson  treats  the  same  experience; 
but  he  has  advanced  to  the  point  where  faith  enables 
him  to  grapple  with  it  upon  equal  terms,  and  even 
with  a  sort  of  whimsical  playfulness. 

Life  is  a  coquetry 
Of  Death,  which  wearies  me, 
Too  sure 
Of  the  amour. 

A  tiring-room  where  I 
Death's  divers  garments  try 
Till  fit 
Some  fashion  sit. 

It  seemeth  me  too  much 
I  do  rehearse  for  such 
A  mean 
And  single  scene. 

The  climax  might  be  capped  by  a  verse  or  two 

of  Mr.  Kipling's  poem,  "To  Wolcott  Balestier," 

surely  the  most  rollicking  of  threnodies,  but  yet 

significant  of  a  certain  vigour  which  faith  lends  to 

^  Archer,  Poets  of  the  Younger  Generation^  p.  365. 


^0  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

poetry,  and  which,  though  doubtless  in  more  chas- 
tened form,  is  necessary  to  poetry's  higher  develop- 
ment. So  long  as  faith  is  lacking,  even  the  well- 
endowed  poet  will  not  only  tend  to  write  his  music 
in  a  minor  key,  but  be  forced  to  content  himself 
with  a  place  in  the  second  or  third  rank  of  the 
world's  singers.  ^ 

On  the  other  hand,  the  note  of  faith,  even  when 
awkwardly  or  rudely  struck,  always  finds  its  echo 
in  men's  hearts.  Walt  Whitman  can  scarce  be 
credited  with  a  particularly  exalted  mind ;  while 
his  taste,  if  it  existed  at  all,  can  often  be  repre- 
sented only  by  a  negative  quantity,  his  own  phrase, 
^^  barbaric  yawp,"  pretty  exactly  characterizing  the 
greater  part  of  his  poetry;  yet  there  was  in  the 
man  himself,  and  there  still  speaks  through  his 
writings,  a  certain  robustious  ^acceptance  of  the 
Universe,'  which  has  given  him  place  and  fame 
among  the  inspirers  of  men.  There  was  a  time 
when  great  things  were  expected  of  Mr.  William 
Watson,  and  very  admirable  things  have  been  done 
to  fulfil  the  expectation ;  but  yet  on  the  mass  of  his 
work  there  rests  a  sort  of  blight,  which,  while  some- 
times enhancing  its  beauty,  condemns  it  to  relative 
ineffectiveness,  because  man's  natural  taste  is  bound 
finally  to  refuse  the  negative  and  fretful.  Mr. 
Stephen  Phillips  has  inspired  like  expectations  and 
achieved  memorable  successes.  A  master  of  phrase, 
who  may  sometimes  be  suspected  of  making  phrases 
for  sheer  love  of  the  trade,  he  has  seemed  to  yield 


THE  HEYDAY   OF  MINOR  POETRY  491 

to  the  fashion  of  his  day  in  "  Christ  in  Hades/'  a 
very  notable  sketch  rather  than  a  great  poem ;  ^  on 
the  other  hand,  for  delicacy,  sweetness,  and  power 
to  reveal  all  that  is  deepest  and  highest  in  the  human 
heart,  his  "  Marpessa  "  will,  it  seems  to  me,  bear  to 
be  set  beside  any  English  poem  of  the  last  fifty 
years,  without  fear  of  the  comparison.  His  later 
dramatic  work  has  been  too  extravagantly  praised 
to  make  any  fair  estimate  of  it  quite  practicable. 
Suffice  it  to  say  that  no  recent  poet  has  attempted 
dramatic  tragedy  with  a  better  literary  equipment 
or  more  reasonable  hope  of  fame. 

Meanwhile,  amid  the  thousand  musical  voices  that 
have  been  raised  upon  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic  to 
sing  of  life  and  love  and  death,  it  is  interesting  to 
note  how  often  a  poet  is  distinguished  by  some 
haunting  word  upon  religion.  The  late  Francis 
Thompson  could  never  have  been  a  popular  writer, 
so  fanciful,  involved,  and  even  grotesque  was  much 
of  his  work.  Yet  his  "  Hound  of  Heaven  "  has  not 
only  become  widely  known,  but  has  been  chosen  for 
special  and  elaborate  publication  in  America  as  his 
most  characteristic  utterance.  It  begins :  — 

I  fled  Him  down  the  nights  and  down  the  days ; 

I  fled  Him  down  the  arches  of  the  years ; 
I  fled  Him  down  the  labyrinthine  ways 

Of  my  own  mind ;  and  in  the  midst  of  tears 
I  hid  from  Him,  and  under  running  laughter. 

*  Compare  the  criticism  of  Mr.  William  Archer,  in  Poets  of  the 
Younger  Generation,  pp.  328-329. 


492  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Up  vistaed  hopes  I  sped ; 

And  shot  precipitated 
Adown  Titanic  glooms  of  chasmed  fears, 
From  those  strong  feet  that  followed,  followed  after. 

But  with  unhurrying  chase, 

And  unperturbed  pace, 
Deliberate  speed,  majestic  instancy. 

They  beat  —  and  a  Voice  beat 

More  instant  than  the  Feet  — 
"  All  things  betray  thee,  who  betrayest  Me." 

Probably  more  people  know  Mr.  R.  W.  Gilder  by 
his  two  quatrains,  beginning  — 

If  Jesus  Christ  is  a  man, 

than  by  anything  else  that  he  has  written.  The 
quaint  dogmatism  of  the  late  T.  E.  Brown's  "  My 
Garden  "  is  likely  to  be  remembered  far  longer  than 
that  gifted  Manxman's  inspiring  "  Letters." 

A  garden  is  a  lovesome  thing,  God  wot ! 

Rose  plot. 

Fringed  pool, 

Ferned  grot  — 

The  veriest  school 

Of  peace ;  and  yet  the  fool 

Contends  that  God  is  not  — 

Not  God !  in  gardens  when  the  eve  is  cool  ? 

Nay,  but  I  have  a  sign ; 

'T  is  very  sure  God  walks  in  mine. 

This  same  assurance  of  the  essential  soundness  of 
the  Universe,  its  possession  by  a  rational  Spirit,  and 
man's  capacity  to  dominate  it  in  the  interests  of  his 
completer  life,  goes  far  to  account  for  the  appeal 
which  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  and  Mr.  Kipling  have 


THE  HEYDAY  OF  MINOR  POETRY  493 

made  to  the  present  generation.  Stevenson,  though 
the  master  of  prose,  was  but  an  indifferent  poet ; 
he  had  his  share  of  contact  with  the  world's  rough 
hand,  to  say  nothing  of  his  long  struggle  to  make 
an  ailing  body  do  a  full  day's  work.  Yet  it  would 
be  hard  to  surpass  the  buoyancy  and  zest  with  which 
he  met  experience,  or  to  overemphasize  his  assur- 
ance that  faith  was  needful  to  life.  His  confession 
of  this  faith  is  famous :  — 

For  still  the  Lord  is  Lord  of  might ; 
In  deeds,  in  deeds,  He  takes  delight ; 
The  plough,  the  spear,  the  laden  harks, 
The  field,  the  founded  city  marks ; 
He  marks  the  smiler  of  the  streets, 
The  singer  upon  garden  seats ; 
He  sees  the  climber  in  the  rocks ; 
To  Him  the  shepherd  folds  his  flocks. 
For  those  He  loves  that  underprop 
With  daily  virtues  Heaven's  top, 
And  bear  the  falling  sky  with  ease, 
Unfrowning  caryatides. 

Mr.  Kipling's  McAndrew  singing  to  his  engine's 
music  of  — 

"  Law,  Order,  Duty  an'  Restraint,  Obedience,  Discipline !  " 

joins  in  the  same  chorus ;  and  even  the  common  sol- 
dier with  his  inappeaseable  hunger  — 

For  to  admire  and  for  to  see, 

bears  witness  to  man's  power  to  rule  circumstance, 
if  he  have  faith  enough. 

The  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  has  been 


494  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

luminously  stated  by  Mr.  A.  H.  Crauford  in  his 
"  Enigmas  of  the  Spiritual  Life." 

"Poetry  is  as  music  come  to  itself,  rallying  from 
its  divine  trance,  and  vainly  endeavouring  to  por- 
tray those  sacred  and  awful  things  which  it  is  not 
lawful  for  a  man  to  utter.  The  very  root  or  spring 
of  poetry  is  an  abiding  discontent  with  the  actual 
and  a  quenchless  longing  for  the  Ideal.  .  .  .  Ke- 
volt  against  what  is  thought  to  be  religion  may  in- 
spire a  great  poem,  as  it  inspired  Lucretius  and 
Shelley ;  but  acquiescence  in  the  vanishing  of  reli- 
gion is  fatally  depressing  to  poets.  Gods  are  needed 
if  only  to  be  defied.  The  Sublime  may  live  in  ap- 
parent antagonism  to  the  Infinite ;  but  it  cannot  live 
in  the  absence  of  the  Infinite.  Poetry  must  invent 
a  God  if  none  really  exists." 

And  so  must  Life. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE   NEWER    FICTION.    I 

At  a  recent  meeting  of  the  American  £[istorical 
Association,  the  learned  President,  Professor  G.  B. 
Adams  of  Yale,  chose  as  the  theme  of  his  annual  ad- 
dress, "  History  and  the  Philosophy  of  History."  The 
speaker  belongs  to  a  school  of  investigators  many  of 
whom  have  gone  so  far  in  their  suspicion  of  generali- 
zation, their  contempt  of  style,  and  their  worship  of 
bare  '  facts,'  as  to  hasten  a  reaction  that  was  bound 
to  come.  Let  me  not  however  seem  to  bring  a  railing 
accusation  against  Professor  Adams  himself.  The 
significant  thing  about  the  address  was  his  recogni- 
tion of  the  impending  change,  and  the  welcome,  al- 
beit a  lugubrious  welcome,  which  he  extended  to  it. 
With  real  generosity,  though  it  was  the  generosity  of 
a  much-enduring  and  chastened  spirit,  he  admitted 
the  gnawing  hunger  of  men  for  the  meaning  of 
things.  Caspar  at  his  cottage  door  reiterating  the  fact 
of  Marlborough's  triumph  can  no  longer  quite  ignore 
little  Peterkin,  with  his  insistent  "  What  good  came 
of  it  at  last  ?  "  Nay,  he  must  even  be  civil  on  occa- 
sion to  Wilhelmine's  dogmatic,  "  Why,  't  was  a  very 
wicked  thing !  "  Neither  Peterkin  nor  Wilhelmine 
is,  if  I  interpret  this  address  aright,  persona  grata 


496  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

to  Professor  Adams  and  his  fellows ;  but  the  time 
is  coming  when  they  must  be  not  merely  endured 
but  recognized.  History  must  take  account  of  them, 
perhaps  be  delivered  for  a  time  into  the  hands  of 
those  who  share  their  possession  by  the  demons  of 
philosophy ;  as  St.  Paul  delivered  Hymenseus  and 
Alexander  unto  Satan  —  until  they  should  learn  not 
to  blaspheme. 

I  would  not  speak  lightly  of  the  labours  of  the  his- 
torical investigator.  His  research  is  of  course  a  prime 
factor  in  the  great  and  too  little  esteemed  branch  of 
learning  to  which  he  devotes  himself.  But  the  fact 
remains  that  it  is  a  part  of  the  historian's  duty  to  in- 
terpret as  well  as  to  depict ;  and,  if  he  insist  upon  re- 
maining a  mere  annalist  or  editor,  he  will  have  no 
reason  to  complain  when  the  mass  of  intelligent  men 
desert  him  for  the  sociologist  and  political  economist. 
Every  intellectual  calling  tends  to  develop  the 
scribe,  and  to  degenerate  under  his  hand  into  a  sort 
of  game  which  none  but  the  initiated  can  play.  The 
field  of  Biblical  criticism  offers  perhaps  the  most 
notable  illustration  of  this  tendency  to-day ;  but 
every  path  of  technical  learning  is  likely  to  lead  us 
into  a  similar  desert  of  professionalism,  where  we 
shall  cease  to  be  the  masters  of  ideas  and  become 
mere  servants  of  convention.  The  danger  which 
lurks  in  "settling  Hoti's  business"  is  that  there 
shall  seem  to  be  no  worthy  business  but  Hoti's  in 
the  world.^ 

^  In  general,  explanatory  notes  are  fatal  to  the  force  of  literary 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  497 

All  art  faces  this  peril,  which  comes  with  the 
formation  of  a  '  school ';  and  the  art  of  story-telling 
is  no  exception  to  the  rule.  A  great  artist  may  found 
a  school ;  he  can  rarely  be  shut  up  to  the  terms  and 
rules  of  one.  We  have  seen  in  earlier  chapters  how 
persistently  the  Masters  of  Fiction  transcend  the 
limits  of  the  professional  labels  wherewith  critics 
would  tag  them.  The  quality  of  genius  does  not 
adapt  it  to  residence  in  pigeon-holes,  and  satisfac- 
torily to  define  a  man  generally  means  his  assignment 
to  the  third  or  fourth  rank.  To  call  Scott  a  roman- 
ticist, as  though  he  were  nothing  more,  is  to  focus 
attention  upon  the  mere  framework  of  his  novels ; 
and  to  speak  of  Thackeray  as  a  realist  —  at  least  in 
the  technical  sense  of  that  hard-used  term  —  is  to 
penetrate  little  deeper  than  the  surface  of  his  work. 
One  cannot  think  of  Dickens  as  sitting  down  de- 
liberately to  construct  a  novel  in  accordance  with 
certain  approved  rules  of  the  art ;  and  when  George 
Eliot  is  caught  mapping  out  an  elaborate  fiction- 
scheme  and  working  up  '  local  colour,'  she  shows  her 
lesser  rather  than  her  greater  side.  '  Local  colour,' 
indeed,  when  sought  for  itself,  generally  proves  to 
be  a  poor  thing  enough.  What  goes  by  that  name 
in  "  Adam  Bede  '*  is  really  almost  as  universal  as  the 
sunlight ;  and  in  so  far  as  its  tints  are  governed  by 
the  neighbourhood  in  which  the  scene  is  laid,  the 

allusions  and  impertinent  to  the  reader  as  well ;  but  Browning  is  an 
exception  to  all  rules,  and  so  if  any  reader  has  difficulty  here,  let  him 
turn  to  The  GrammariarCs  Funeral. 


498  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

realism  is  not  a  thing  the  author  sought,  but  a  nat- 
ural part  of  her  experience ;  she  was  not  so  much 
possessed  of  it  as  by  it.  Later  on  she  began  in  the 
more  modern  manner  to  make  journeys,  to  consult 
lawyers,  and  to  institute  research,  in  order  that  her 
pictures  of  life  might  gain  an  exacter  verity ;  with 
the  result  that  something  of  her  vital  quality  de- 
parted ;  and  had  a  few  more  years  been  granted  her, 
she  would  have  seen,  and  deserved  to  see,  among 
the  monstrosities  of  book-making,  a  "  Romola  "  il- 
lustrated with  half-tone  photographs  of  Florence. 

The  camera,  with  its  so-called  '  truth  to  nature,' 
is  a  tool  of  great  convenience ;  but  it  has  infected 
some  little  men  with  madness.  In  fact,  the  camera 
may  prove  as  untruthful  as  an  epitaph.  Any  one 
who  will  take  the  trouble  to  reverse  his  photo- 
graphic film  in  the  process  of  printing  may  repro- 
duce the  features  of  a  horseman,  for  instance,  with 
perfect  distinctness  and  verisimilitude ;  yet  the  rider 
will  be  guiding  his  horse  with  the  right  instead  of 
the  left  hand ;  his  girths  will  be  secured  upon  the 
wrong  side ;  every  detail  of  his  equipment  is  liable 
to  like  whimsical  reversal ;  and  should  he  be  caught 
in  the  act  of  mounting,  it  will  be  by  aid  of  the 
^  off  '  stirrup,  like  Mr.  Winkle  in  the  immortal  Pick- 
wick episode.  The  initiated  will  possibly  discover 
the  trick  as  such  a  picture  is  examined ;  but  to  the 
ignorant  nothing  will  seem  wrong ;  he  may  recog- 
nize both  man  and  horse,  and  exclaim  upon  the 
excellence  of  the  likeness;  he  might  conceivably 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  499 

form  his  own  horsemanship  upon  this  model  and 
wonder  why  he  is  a  laughing-stock,  until  told  that 
while  each  '  fact '  and  '  feature '  of  reality  is  cor- 
rectly depicted  in  the  photograph,  the  relations  are 
so  topsy-turvy  as  to  make  the  whole  thing  a  pecu- 
liarly dangerous,  because  a  remarkably  consistent, 
lie. 

I  am  not  contending  that  ability  to  paint  exactly 
the  less  conspicuous  and  dignified  facts  of  life  is  of 
little  moment  to  the  writer  of  fiction.  By  all  means 
let  the  presentment  of  the  parish  pump  be  lifelike ; 
but  let  it  be  remembered  at  the  same  time  that  too 
great  dependence  upon  parish  pumps  sets  parochial 
limits  to  the  work  in  which  they  figure.  There  is  a 
something  — 

far  more  deeply  interfused, 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  snns, 
And  the  round  ocean,  and  the  li\dng  air, 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man : 
A  motion  and  a  spirit. 

I  would  not  dogmatize  here.  If  any  reader  prefer 
to  say  that  there  only  seems  to  be  something,  I  am 
content  for  the  moment  to  have  it  so ;  simply  re- 
marking that  the  seeming  is  one  of  the  vital  facts 
of  life  and  a  fact  of  utmost  moment  to  the  pro- 
duction of  great  imaginative  literature.  It  is  hard 
to  believe  that  either  "  A  Winter's  Tale  "  or  "  As 
You  Like  It  "  could  have  gained  much  had  the  sea- 
coast  of  Bohemia  been  charted  or  an  ordnance  map 
of  the  Forest  of  Arden  lain  at  Shakespeare's  hand. 


500  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Writers  of  fiction  are  bound  to  take  account  of 
Religion;  partly  upon  general  principles,  because 
of  the  place  which  religious  views  and  institutions 
hold  in  the  life  of  all  ages  and  races ;  and  partly 
because  each  new  generation  has  its  own  religious 
experiences  and  problems,  which  often  seem  of  tran- 
scendent importance  to  its  day.  Chaucer's  Pilgrims, 
for  instance,  illustrate  the  instinctive  recourse  of 
early  literature  to  institutional  religion  for  the  natu- 
ral setting  or  frame  of  a  work  of  the  imagination. 
The  Pilgrimage  is  itself  formally  religious ;  a  large 
number  of  the  Pilgrims  are  more  or  less  closely  — 
and  unworthily  —  identified  with  the  service  of  the 
Church  ;  the  characters  who  figure  in  the  Tales  are 
often  Churchmen ;  and  few  scraps  of  Chaucer's  verse 
are  better  or  more  deservedly  remembered  than  that 
which  portrays  the  godly  parish  priest. 

Butler's  "Hudibras,"  on  the  other  hand,  illus- 
trates what  the  religious  controversies  of  some  par- 
ticular generation  may  do  for  a  clever  author  who 
IS  as  far  as  possible  from  planning  a  religious  work ; 
just  as  "  The  Pilgrim's  Progress"  has  enshrined  in 
imperishable  form  the  older  Puritan  theology  as 
well  as  the  deep  perennial  experiences  of  man's  heart. 
The  distinction  between  the  two  is  one  which  has 
application  to  the  literature  of  our  own  day.  "Hudi- 
bras"  remains  the  greatest  burlesque  in  English  — 
a  marvel  of  cleverness ;  yet  to  the  general  reader  it 
is  likely  to  be  known  only  by  shreds  and  patches ; 
which  in  turn  may  be  said  to  live  by  their  wits.  The 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  501 

same  fate  must  have  overtaken  "  The  Pilgrim's  Pro- 
gress "  had  it  been  designed  primarily  to  maintain 
or  to  oppose  some  current  theological  scheme ;  but 
because  Bunyan  told  the  story  of  his  own  religious 
experience  and  developed  its  universal  qualities,  his 
allegory  lives  with  a  vitality  so  abundant  as  to  gal- 
vanize its  very  raiment  and  baggage  into  at  least 
the  semblance  of  life.  Butler  depicts,  though  con- 
troversially and  in  terms  of  burlesque,  the  habit 
of  a  day ;  Bunyan  interprets  the  experience  of  the 
race. 

In  attempting  to  apply  these  principles  to  a  study 
of  recent  fiction,  one  is  almost  overwhelmed  in  the 
first  place  by  its  mass,  and  considerably  hampered 
in  the  second  by  the  effort  of  a  certain  school  of 
writers  to  resolve  the  telling  of  tales  into  a  thing  of 
rules  and  conventions.  The  latter  tries  the  critic's 
temper ;  the  former  daunts  him,  not  merely  by  the 
amount  of  reading  needful  for  adequate  acquaint- 
ance with  the  field  which  he  is  traversing,  but  by 
the  fact  that  so  much  time  must  be  given  to  books 
which,  like  the  prophet's  gourd,  spring  up  with  vast 
luxuriance  in  a  night  to  wither  in  a  day.  Some  of 
these  are  veriest  trash  and  give  point  to  Lamb's  say- 
ing that  when  a  new  book  appeared  he  liked  to  read 
an  old  one.  Others,  by  their  genuineness,  insight, 
careful  construction,  and  excellent  style,  claim  every 
right  to  live,  but  cannot,  simply  because  their  num- 
bers are  so  great,  and  the  flowing  tide  of  successors 
so  overwhelming.  These  volumes,  though  abundantly 


/ 


602  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

able  to  maintain  themselves  in  a  fair  field,  often 
seem,  like  the  cavalry  in  Victor  Hugo's  legend  of 
Waterloo,  to  be  ridden  down  by  those  behind  them 
before  they  ever  find  it.  Since,  therefore,  many 
worthy  names  must  be  passed  by  with  a  bare  men- 
tion, while  others  are  omitted  altogether,  I  shall  try 
to  do  little  more  than  indicate  certain  classes  into 
which  the  novels  of  the  last  thirty  years  naturally 
fall  with  reference  to  their  use  of  the  themes  or 
the  spirit  of  religion. 

The  first  of  these  is  the  distinctively  ^  religious ' 
/  novel, — a  work  of  fiction,  that  is,  whose  purpose  is 
either  to  plead  a  religious  or  theological  cause,  or 
else  to  purvey  amusement  so  seasoned  with  piety  as 
to  adapt  it  to  religious  times  and  tastes.  The  insti- 
tution known  as  the  Sunday  School  Library  has  in 
America  caused  a  large  demand  for  this  type  of 
writing,  which  busy  pens  have  been  quick  to  supply. 
That  the  product  should  be  of  mediocre  quality  or 
worse  was  to  have  been  expected.  Yet  here,  as  so 
often  happens,  it  is  probable  that  the  '  clamour  of 
the  time'  has  been  upon  the  whole  unjust  in  its  criti- 
cism. A  ^  Sunday-School  book '  has  commonly  stood 
in  newspaper  parlance  and  in  the  talk  of  the  street 
for  a  story  in  which  the  good  are  preternaturally 
good  and  the  bad  without  redeeming  traits.  If 
the  former  die,  it  is  upon  a  public  death-bed  and  in 
the  most  pungent  odour  of  sanctity ;  while  the  way 
of  the  wicked  is  turned  upside  down.  No  doubt  the 
appointed  Sunday  reading  of  an  elder  day  gave 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  303 

some  justification  to  the  mockers.  It  was  apt  to  be 
either  priggish  and  stilted,  or  else  substantial  and 
dull.  Of  late  years  such  efforts  have  been  made  to 
avoid  the  mawkish  and  unnatural  that  these  defects 
have  been  in  a  considerable  degree  overcome.  These 
libraries  have  found  larger  space  upon  their  shelves 
for  biography  of  a  popular  sort,  for  entertaining 
and  well-illustrated  *  nature-books,'  for  volumes  of 
travel  and  stories  of  adventure;  still  the  chief  de- 
mand is  for  fiction  ;  and  some  fiction  produced  to 
meet  it  has  had  enormous  vogue. 

An  American  author,  E.  P.  Roe,  wrote  and  sold 
by  the  tens  of  thousands  books  like  "  Barriers 
Burned  Away,"  in  which  true  love  and  true  piety, 
after  passing  through  fire  and  flood,  —  the  fire  be- 
ing the  conflagration  which  in  1871  destroyed  Chi- 
cago, —  triumphed  gloriously  together.  It  was  far 
enough  from  being  literature,  and  yet  much  human 
nature  with  some  genuine  humour  and  pathos  found 
expression.  The  worst  that  can  be  said  of  it  is  that 
it  was  somewhat  lush  and  sentimental.  J.  G.  Hol- 
land, a  journalist  and  magazine  editor  of  distinction 
in  his  day,  is  another  writer  whose  later  fiction  must 
be  included  here,  though  it  is  characterized  by  much 
firmer  fibre  and  a  far  truer  literary  sense.  A  book 
like  "  Arthur  Bonnicastle "  could  scarcely  have 
been  written,  or  must  have  missed  a  large  part  of 
its  multitude  of  readers,  but  for  the  moral  and  reli- 
gious purpose  which  speaks  so  honestly  through 
it.  Critics  of  literature  do  not  stop  to  discuss  the 


504  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

numerous  volumes  of  "  A.  L.  0.  E."  The  author  of 
'•  The  Schonberg-Cotta  Family  "  finds  scant  grace 
at  the  hands  of  cyclopedia-makers  ;  Mrs.  Ewing  is 
dismissed  with  a  paragraph  ;  Miss  Charlotte Yonge 
and  Mrs.  Craik  with  a  column.  Though  the  two 
last-named  belong  to  an  elder  generation,  the  qual- 
ity of  their  work  has  given  it  not  only  wide  popu- 
larity, but  such  distinction  as  primacy  in  the  class 
which  we  are  discussing  can  confer.  "  John  Hali- 
fax, Gentleman "  and  "  A  Noble  Life  "  are  no 
doubt  a  little  surcharged  with  sentiment ;  yet  the 
large  place  which  they  and  their  compeers  have 
held  in  the  '  Sunday  reading '  of  the  last  thirty 
years  affords  matter  for  congratulation  to  lovers  of 
literature  as  well  as  to  guardians  of  morals.  The 
late  Dean  Farrar's  "Eric,"  and  other  stories  of 
school-life,  are  better  than  those  fancy  who  know 
them  only  as  the  objects  of  Mr.  Kipling's  contempt ; 
but  their  lack  of  the  quality  which  has  made  "  Tom 
Brown  "  a  classic  is  evident  enough. 

More  recently  there  has  arisen  a  type  midway  be- 
tween the  distinctively  religious  novel  and  the  story 
of  adventure  or  of  manners,  which  may  serve  to  con- 
nect this  class  with  that  which  follows  it.  Mr.  C.  W. 
Gordon's  "  Sky  Pilot,"  and  some  of  Mr.  Norman 
Duncan's  stories,  in  their  successful  appeal  to 
readers,  make  almost  equal  use  of  the  conditions 
of  frontier-life  and  the  experiences  of  missionary 
preachers  or  medical  men.  The  instant  acceptance 
of  Mr.  J.  M.  Barrie's  "  Auld  Licht  Idylls  "  and  the 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  505 

late  John  Watson's  "Beside  the  Bonnie  Brier-Bush" 
was  due  to  something  more  than  a  clever  literary 
device.  A  story  of  humble  life,  told  with  genuine 
skill  and  out  of  first-hand  knowledge,  will  always 
find  readers;  charge  such  a  tale  with  sentiment 
which  upon  the  whole  is  true  and  sane,  spice  it 
with  humour,  sweeten  and  light  the  whole  with  the 
faith  of  wayfaring  men  who  seek  a  celestial  city, 
and  it  at  once  develops  the  elements  of  the  widest 
if  not  the  most  permanent  popularity. 

The  second  of  the  classes  above  referred  to  com- 
prises some  eminent  names  and  books,  which  must, 
however,  be  rather  summarily  dismissed,  because  they 
do  not  fall  immediately  within  the  field  of  our  view. 
It  includes  the  novels  of  contemporary  manners  into 
1  which  religion  enters  as  an  incident  —  sometimes 
L  merely  as  an  accident  —  of  life.  How  much  Mr. 
W.  D.  Ho  wells  and  Mr.  Henry  James  owe  to  the 
mystical  Swedenborgian  doctrines  of  their  fathers 
I  have  no  means  of  estimating.  Both  have  been 
prolific  writers,  and  each  has  exerted  a  considerable 
influence  upon  literary  faith  and  practice.  Both 
know  New  England  at  first  hand  and  have  done 
much  to  interpret  it  to  the  world ;  but  neither  has 
had  the  intimate  and  deep  experience  of  its  religious 
life  needful  for  an  entirely  true  picture.  The  outer 
framework  of  meeting-house,  parsonage,  Sunday 
school,  prayer-meeting,  and  all  the  rest,  has  been 
treated  by  too  many  writers  as  if  it  were  the  only 
index  of  Puritan  religious  life  that  they  needed  to 


506  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

consult.  Miss  Mary  E.  Wilkins  (Mrs.  Freeman)  saw 
with  clearer  vision,  but  has  chosen  to  occupy  her- 
self too  exclusively  with  the  development  of  its 
sombre  and  often  tragic  elements.  Others  with  less 
literary  skill  have  made  cheap  sport  of  it.  In  the 
realm  of  the  short  story  it  has  remained  for  Miss 
Sarah  Orne  Jewett  to  interpret  it  with  an  understand- 
ing heart.  To  her  its  finer  features  have  been  re- 
vealed, and  her  charming  tales  of  a  people  to  whom 
she  belonged  by  sympathy  as  well  as  blood,  are 
unmarred  so  far  as  I  remember  by  any  blemish  of 
caricature  or  condescension.  It  is  not  necessary  to 
the  New  Englander  of  Puritan  type  that  the  world 
think  well  of  him,  though  he  does  not  despise  its 
esteem ;  he  can  bear,  because  he  is  used  to  bear- 
ing, misunderstanding  and  caricature,  even  the  con- 
descension of  literary  people'  sometimes  having 
its  amusing  side ;  the  thing  which  he  cannot  bear  is 
self-revelation  of  the  depths  in  his  thought  and 
experience  to  those  who  would  misunderstand,  or, 
worse  still,  tell  cheap  tales  of  sacred  things  which 
they  had  partly  seen.  The  writer  who  will  do  justice 
to  the  religious  life  of  New  England,  especially  to 
its  depths  of  tenderness,  its  intense  idealism,  its 
capacity  not  so  much  for  ascetic  as  for  hidden 
sacrifice,  and  perhaps  most  of  all  to  its  unfailing 
humour,  —  a  humour  essentially  related  to  its  faith, 
—  and  who  will  do  this  in  a  work  of  sustained  power, 
will  go  far  toward  producing  ^  the  great  American 
novel.' 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  607 

The  late  Edward  Eggleston,  who  before  his  death 
had  become  known  as  a  historian  rather  than  as  a 
novelist,  is  quite  as  likely  to  be  remembered  by  the 
sketches  of  life  in  the  Middle  West  to  which  itiner- 
ant preaching  introduced  his  youth,  as  by  the  pains- 
taking research  of  his  maturity.  "  The  Circuit 
Rider  "  and  "  The  Hoosier  Schoolmaster  "  have  an 
historical  value  quite  as  real  as  "  The  Beginnings 
of  a  Nation."  Bret  Harte  has  done  a  similar  sei^ 
vice  to  the  Pacific  slope  and  the  days  of  the  Argo- 
nauts ;  and  in  the  doing  it  has  shown  talents  of  so 
unusual  a  quality  as  probably  to  win  a  secure  place 
for  his  work.  Not  only  does  an  indefinable  distinc- 
tion attach  to  his  manner,  but  a  very  genuine  hu- 
manity appears  in  his  matter.  He  would  doubtless 
have  resented  the  accusation  of  preaching  in  his 
novels ;  yet,  apart  from  his  deliciously  farcical  verse, 
and  his  parodies,  to  the  making  of  which  he  brought 
almost  unique  gifts,  the  bulk  of  his  most  signifi- 
cant prose  is  one  long  and  ingenious  endeavour  to 
show  the  image  of  God,  as  it  persisted,  sometimes 
altogether  hidden,  more  often  badly  defaced  and 
obscured,  in  the  souls  of  rude,  profane,  and  even 
criminal  men.  Mrs.  Margaret  Deland  has  not  only 
contributed  a  portrait  to  the  gallery  of  modern 
theological  martyrs,  — a  rather  sickly  crew  upon  the 
whole,  —  in  her  "John  Ward,  Preacher,"  but  has 
put  the  reading  public  in  her  permanent  debt  by 
acquainting  them  with  the  Reverend  Dr.  Lavender 
of  Chester.  Mrs.  Edith  Wharton,  who  has  chosen 


508  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

to  depict  Vanity  Fair  in  various  modern  guises,  has 
also  chosen  to  go  to  Scripture  for  her  titles,  as 
"The  House  of  Mirth"  and  "The  Fruit  of  the 
Tree"  bear  witness.  Mr.  Archibald  Marshall,  in 
"Exton  Manor,"  has  followed  Trollope,  though 
with  no  lack  of  originality,  in  a  latter-day  story  of 
clerical  life  and  parochial  tragi-comedy.  Maxwell 
Gray  will  be  longest  and  best  remembered  by  her 
very  charming  picture  of  life  in  a  country  parson- 
age, and  her  not  very  convincing  Dean  Maitland. 
Du  Maurier's  "  Peter  Ibbetson  "  is  not  to  be  under- 
stood except  as  drawn  against  the  background  of 
Pentonville  with  its  respectability  and  its  Sabbata- 
rianism ;  though  the  reader  all  the  time  suspects  his 
author  of  doing  less  justice  to  Pentonville  than 
Thackeray  in  "  Vanity  Fair  "  did  to  Clapham. 

A  significant  note  of  revolt  is  sounded  in  work 
like  Lucas  Malet's  "  Sir  Richard  Calmady,"  which, 
while  purporting  to  be  a  novel  of  the  day  rather 
than  a  Tendenzschrift,  still  shows  unmistakably 
the  author's  impatience  with  commonly  accepted 
standards  of  belief  and  morals,  —  the  most  nota- 
ble feature  of  the  book  being,  not  any  partic- 
ular doctrine  of  faith  or  unbelief  explicitly  stated 
in  it,  but  the  grotesque  deformity  which  haunts 
the  whole  story.  Now  a  physical  misfortune  may 
exert  the  same  ennobling  influence  upon  a  work  of 
fiction  that  it  does  in  real  life,  calling  out  that 
ability  to  conquer  hostile  circumstance  which  is 
man's  highest  quality.  Sir  Richard  shows  in  the 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  609 

physical  sphere  something  of  this  power ;  but  the 
author  never  lets  its  spirit  blow  through  her  book 
as  a  whole.  That  remains  unwholesome  and  sallow ; 
its  appeal,  in  spite  of  the  writer's  probable  inten- 
tion, being  of  the  macabre  order,  striking  the  im- 
agination and  gripping  the  attention  like  a  dance 
of  death.  On  the  other  hand  Mr.  William  De  Mor- 
gan, in  a  group  of  novels  which  have  recently  de- 
lighted many  readers,  brings  a  cathoHc  taste  and 
an  admirable  digestion  to  life's  table.  He  finds 
it  spread  with  a  strange  assortment  of  sweet  and 
bitter ;  with  some  things  indeed  that  have  gener- 
ally been  counted  poisonous  beyond  the  power  of 
antidote;  yet  ^agnostic'  though  one  suspects  Mr. 
De  Morgan  himself  to  be,  he  still  has  faith  in  life 
and  love  and  truth,  which  comes  so  near  to  having 
faith  in  God,  that  in  a  literary  sense  at  least  he  is 
saved  by  it,  as  his  abounding  humour,  which  is  one 
of  the  sure  notes  of  literary  salvation,  witnesses. 

It  was  to  be  expected  that  the  rising  tide  of  ro- 
manticism in  the  early  part  of  last  century  should 
finally  make  itself  felt  in  the  realm  of  religion. 
The  Oxford  Movement  shows  how  profoundly  it  in- 
fluenced certain  branches  of  theological  thought. 
The  poetry  and  prose  of  Newman  are  equally  in- 
stinct with  it;  while  the  fact  that  Newman's  most 
strenuous  antagonist  among  men  of  letters  turned 
it  to  account  in  "  Hypatia,"  serves  to  remind  us  how 
catholic  the  romantic  influence  was.  The  first  at- 
tempts to  introduce  sacred  scenes  and  persons  into 


r 


610  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

fiction  were  regarded  with  grave  suspicion;  but 
these  qualms  soon  passed,  and  before  the  century 
ended  the  ^ Early  Christian  Novel'  grew  so  common 
as  to  become  a  sort  of  literary  nuisance.  Any 
'prentice  hand  was  liable  to  essay  one,  with  results 
equally  disastrous  from  the  standpoint  of  good 
literature  and  of  good  taste.  Yet  this  kind  of 
writing  found  multitudes  of  readers :  sometimes 
because  it  was  genuine  literature,  not  merely  set- 
ting forth  the  circumstances  of  an  early  day,  but 
interpreting  universal  problems  and  experiences  in 
terms  of  them;  sometimes  because  of  its  dramatic, 
or  more  often  melodramatic,  quality;  occasionally 
because  the  hearts  of  men  were  honestly  warmed 
as  they  heard  sacred  stories  retold  in  common 
speech  and  saw  the  men  of  Scripture  at  their  ordi- 
nary occupations;  and  sometimes,  it  is  to  be  sus- 
pected, because  the  writers  of  these  tales  permitted 
themselves  a  larger  latitude  in  showing  the  seamy 
side  of  ancient  life  than  would  have  been  possible 
but  for  their  introduction  of  a  sacred  character  or 
two;  the  presence  of  Jemima,  Keren-Happuch,  or 
Kezia  serving  as  antidote  to  many  an  impropriety 
of  Zophar  or  Bildad. 

Some  of  these  books  seem  to  have  been  com- 
posed with  the  idea  of  revolutionizing  the  received 
estimate  of  Bible  characters;  some  because  a  ^shil- 
ling shocker'  was  more  easily  achieved  in  this  than 
in  any  other  way;  and  some  have  doubtless  found 
place  in  the  list  of  permitted  Sunday  reading  under 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  611 

pretences  no  less  dubious  than  those  which  in  Mr. 
BirrelFs  youth  opened  Sorrow's  "Bible  in  Spain" 
to  him  on  that  day.  Nor  has  English  enjoyed  any 
monopoly  in  this  sort  of  writing;  other  languages 
have  borne  similar  fruit,  and  much  of  it  has  been 
for  export.  Swedish  has  given  us  Victor  Rydberg's 
gloomy  and  powerful  "Last  Athenian/'  and  Polish 
has  yielded  Sienkiewicz's  "Quo  Vadis."  The  late 
Lew  Wallace's  "  Ben  Hur "  proved  enormously 
popular  in  America,  and  has  doubtless  gone  to 
Sweden  and  Poland  to  help  keep  the  balance  true. 
[Walter  Pater  made  use  of  one  form  of  this  same 
'device  in  "Marius  the  Epicurean,"  and  of  course 
conferred  literary  distinction  upon  it.  At  the  risk 
of  giving  offence  in  some  quarters  I  should  incline 
also  to  include  here  Kenan's  "Vie  de  Jesus," 
which  has  had  a  wide  reading  in  English ;  for  it  is 
essentially  a  romance,  marked  by  great  Hterary 
charm,  and  occasional  lapses  into  history. 

Mr.  Andrew  Lang  wrote  a  characteristic  essay 
upon  this  class  of  novels  a  few  years  ago  *  in  which 
he  maintained  that  they  answer  in  our  day  to  the 
Miracle  and  Mystery  Plays  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
Their  popularity  certainly  goes  far  to  show  the 
worth  of  religion  as  a  *  literary  asset';  whether 
they  will  leave  any  abiding  mark  upon  literature 
remains  to  be  seen.  It  seems  to  me  doubtful. 
\  "John  Inglesant"  represents  fiction  of  yet  a 
fourth  type,  and  is  perhaps  the  best  of  its  class. 
»  "  The  'Early  Christian'  Novel,"  Longman's  Magazine^  1898. 


612  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  reading  world  of  the  early  eighties  wondered 
that  a  book  at  once  so  intense,  so  delicate,  so  alive 
too  with  the  spirit  of  chivalry  and  religion,  should 
have  come  out  of  Birmingham.  It  is  the  fashion 
thus  to  sneer  at  great  industrial  centres  as  '  mate- 
rialistic '  and  lacking  in  ideals.  In  point  of  fact  it 
is  in  just  such  hives  of  industry  that  large  ideas 
often  find  welcome,  and  that  great  enthusiasms 
are  born  and  trained  for  service;  man  being  of 
such  a  nature  that  well-organized  activity  along 
one  line  of  his  interest  is  likely  to  wake  sympathetic 
life  in  another.  He  cannot  even  invent  looms  or 
speculate  about  tariffs  indefinitely  without  coming 
upon  some  matter  which  involves  his  spirit.  One 
generation,  or  at  the  utmost  two,  may  immure 
themselves  within  the  walls  of  '  business ' ;  with  the 
third,  at  least,  some  rebel  is  likely  to  appear.  He 
may  revolt  against  the  family  scheme  of  things 
which  has  provided  his  coign  of  material  vantage; 
or  he  may  on  the  other  hand  accept  his  surround- 
ings as  so  much  scaffolding  to  aid  him  in  building 
a  mansion  for  his  soul.  Peel,  Gladstone,  and  Rus- 
kin,  for  instance,  all  came  from  the  commercial 
class,  and  all  in  their  own  ways  were  idealists, 
though  with  this  difference,  that  while  Peel  seemed 
the  legitimate  and  normal  product  of  his  environ- 
ment, endowed  to  be  sure  with  great  qualities  which 
m  turn  were  highly  developed,  Gladstone  brought 
even  more  brilliant  gifts  to  the  contradiction  as 
often  as  to  the  acceptance  of   the  norms  of  life 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  513 

under  which  he  had  been  bred,  and  Kuskin  con- 
tradicted them  altogether. 

Granted  Mr.  Shorthouse's  Quaker  ancestry,  with 
its  almost  equal  gifts  for  practical  efficiency  and 
mystic  vision,  and  there  was  no  place  whence 
"John  Inglesant "  might  more  fittingly  have 
sprung  than  Birmingham.  With  its  feehng  for 
spiritual  values,  its  respect  for  the  convictions  of 
an  elder  day,  its  joy  in  dwelling  upon  the  half- 
ascetic  life  at  Little  Gidding,  its  sense  of  the  pa- 
thos, mystery,  one  is  tempted  to  say  unreality,  of 
ordinary  human  experience,  its  absolute  assurance 
not  merely  of  the  Being  but  of  the  Immanence 
of  the  Divine,  this  book  was  a  sort  of  portent, 
arising  as  it  did  in  the  heyday  of  physical  science. 
To  sell  eighty  thousand  copies  of  a  novel  in  a 
score  of  years  no  doubt  seems  a  poor  achievement 
enough  in  these  days  of  widely  advertised  '  best- 
sellers'  and  single  editions  running  into  the  tens 
of  thousands;  but  that  eighty  thousand  copies  of 
such  a  book  as  this  should  be  sold  showed  that  the 
appetite  for  spiritual  things  was  still  alive,  since 
few  will  read  "John  Inglesant"  for  mere  amuse- 
ment. Yet  those  who  go  a  mile  with  its  author 
will  feel  a  gentle  compulsion  to  be  his  companion 
for  twain.  The  haunting  quality  of  the  book  is  not 
to  be  denied.  It  has  the  power,  the  eloquence,  and 
the  limitations  of  religion  presented  upon  its  mys- 
tical side.  There  are  few  passages  in  modern  liter- 
ature, for  instance,  more  likely  to  fix  themselves 


5U  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

in  the  reader's  memory  than  the  vision  of  the  blind 
friar  in  Rome,  who,  on  Christmas  Eve,  saw  Christ 
coming  again. 

"Nature  seemed  to  rally  and  to  grow  beneath 
Him,  and  heaven  to  bend  down  to  touch  the  earth. 
A  healing  sense  of  help  and  comfort  like  the  gentle 
dew,  visited  the  weary  heart."  Such  sentences  — 
and  the  whole  passage  is  as  musical  and  significant 
—  make  up  something  more  than  a  purple  patch  of 
rhetoric.  They  never  give  themselves  over  to  sound 
and  fury,  or  degenerate  into  mere  bad  blank  verse, 
but  suggest,  with  a  sort  of  restrained  passion,  not 
so  much  the  vision  and  dream  of  the  mystic  as  the 
great  realities  which  these  foreshadow. 

In  some  of  Mr.  Shorthouse's  other  books,  "  Sir 
Percival,"  for  instance,  the  fibre  of  both  thought 
and  style  relaxed  a  little  and  his  manner  of  treat- 
ment approached. the  sentimental.  Yet  he  remained 
true  upon  the  whole  to  the  better  traditions  of  that 
delicate  mysticism  whence  his  inspiration  came. 

It  is  the  fortune  of  mysticism  to  be  generally 
misinterpreted  and  misunderstood.  Appealing  in 
reality  to  the  highest  and  most  rational  in  man,  its 
false  presentment  makes  appeal  to  that  which  is  near 
to  the  lowest  —  those  superstitions  and  curiosities 
that  snatch  a  fearful  joy  from  the  shadows  in  which 
wizards  peep  and  mutter.  At  the  opposite  end  of  this 
class  of  books  among  which  "  John  Inglesant " 
stands  so  high,  we  may  look  for  the  type  represented 
by  Miss  Corelli's  "  Barabbas "  and  "  Sorrows  of 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  616 

Satan."  It  would  perhaps  be  unfair  to  place  Mr. 
Hall  Caine's  "  The  Christian"  beside  them,  since  it 
makes  no  considerable  use  of  the  pseudo-mystical. 
Yet  the  two  authors  seem  in  contrasting  ways  to 
make  a  similar  appeal  to  the  public  —  to  which  the 
public  has  somewhat  greedily  responded.  The  sen- 
timental and  bizarre  treatment  of  awful  or  sacred 
themes  has  its  reward  in  the  gape  or  shudder  of  a 
day,  in  notoriety,  and  in  dollars ;  and  to  such  treat- 
ment the  themes  of  religion  are  preeminently  fitted; 
but  literature  knows  its  own  and  time  brings  its 
revenges. 

The  two  classes  which  follow  are  especially  char- 
acteristic of  the  last  third  of  the  century.  The  first 

\  of  these  is  pretty  frankly  theological  rather  than  re- 

i  ligious  ;  sometimes  indeed  theological  in  order  that 
it  may  be  anti-religious.  The  second  occupies  itself 
with  giving  social  or  sociological  expression  to  a 
faith  which  is  essentially,  even  though  not  often 

i  confessedly,  religious. 

The  late  George  Macdonald  may  be  said  to  have 
achieved  the  first  great  success  in  adapting  theology 
to  the  needs  of  fiction,  or,  as  some  would  say,  in 
fashioning  the  novel  into  an  engine  of  theological 
controversy.  Other  popular  writers  had  of  course 

,  dealt  incidentally  with  theological  doctrines,  and 
Kingsley  had  touched  them  with  the  light  of  genius ; 
but  it  remained  for  Macdonald  to  make  them  his 
principal  theme.  Few  men  owe  a  heavier  debt  to 
John  Calvin,  and  it  is  one  of  the  tributes  to  Calvin's 


516  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

unquestionable  greatness  that  so  many  lesser,  though 
by  no  means  little,  men  should  have  found  name  and 
fame  in  battling  with  him.  Macdonald  was  predes- 
tined to  the  pen,  and  must  in  any  event  have  written 
books ;  but  it  is  hard  to  imagine  what  sort  of  books, 
had  he  not  found  Scottish  notions  of  Fate  and  Hell 
to  be  antagonized.  This  is  not  to  belittle  his  gener- 
ous equipment  for  any  literary  task  which  life  might 
have  set  him.  "  St.  George  and  St.  Michael,"  for 
instance,  is  a  story  of  genuine  charm,  into  which 
the  elements  of  theology  do  not  largely  enter  ;  and 
"  At  the  Back  of  the  North  Wind  "  bears  testimony 
to  the  quality  of  his  imagination.  But  his  charac- 
teristic books  are  of  the  "  David  Elginbrod  "  and 
I"  Robert  Falconer  "  type,  and  perhaps  his  most 
characteristic  verses  — although  he  wrote  many  that 
had  a  grace  and  charm  which  these  wholly  lack  — 
made  up  the  famous  epitaph, — 

Here  lie  I,  Martin  Elginbrod, 
Ha'e  mercy  on  my  soul,  O  God ; 
As  I  would  do,  were  I  Lord  God, 
And  ye  were  Martin  Elginbrod. 

This  bumptiousness  of  self-assertion  in  the  greatest 
matters  always  has  a  popular  quality,  though  of  the 
cheaper  sort,  as  some  of  W.  E.  Henley's  better- 
known  verses  remain  to  witness  ;  and  it  is  a  literary 
device  in  the  use  of  which  Scotsmen  seem  to  show 
peculiar  deftness.  Characteristic  of  George  Mac- 
donald though  it  be,  other  and  better-conditioned 
qualities  appear  to  modify  and  sweeten  it :  notably 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  517 

his  humour,  his  essential  moral  wholesomeness,  his 
effective  command  of  Scottish  speech,  and  his  sym- 
pathetic insight  into  Scottish  hearts. 

The  interest  excited  by  "David  Elginbrod's" 
appearance  as  the  antagonist  of  Calvinism  in  the 
sixties  was  very  considerable ;  but  it  was  insignifi- 
cant when  contrasted  with  the  sensation  produced 
\a,  little  more  than  twenty  years  later  by  the  advent 
{of  "Robert  Elsmere"  as  the  protagonist  of  *ag- 
/nosticism/  Bunyan,  the  reader  will  remember,  has 
a  character  called  Little-faith,  who  was  robbed  in 
Dead-man's  Lane  by  Faint-heart,  Mistrust,  and 
Guilt,  "  three  sturdy  rogues."  They  bade  him  stand, 
at  which  he  "  looked  as  white  as  a  Clout,  and  had 
neither  power  to  fight  nor  fly."  They  took  his 
money,  at  which  he  sang  out  lustily,  and  was 
promptly  knocked  down.  They,  in  turn,  while  stand- 
ing by  and  doubtless  meditating  further  mischief, 
were  put  to  flight  by  the  approach  of  Great-grace 
from  the  City  of  Good-confidence,  although  he  came 
alone.  Then  after  a  while  Little-faith  "  came  to  him- 
self, and  getting  up,  made  shift  to  scrabble  on  his 
way,"  bereft  of  his  money,  but  —  and  Bunyan  makes 
much  of  this  —  still  in  possession  of  his  jewels, 
which  the  thieves  in  their  hurry  had  overlooked. 
He  missed  the  money  for  the  day's  convenience 
more  than  he  might  have  missed  the  jewels;  but 
the  jewels  were  the  really  precious  things,  and  so 
he  finally  discovered  them  to  be. 

One  is  reminded  of  this  serio-comic  experience 


"518  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

,  of  Little-faith  as  he  sees  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward's 
rather  feeble  hero  trembling  before  the  inexorable 
Squire,  who  robs  him  of  his  faith  in  the  authenticity 
of  the  Fourth  Gospel  and  some  other  convenient 
cash,  yet  leaves  him  his  essential  loyalties  to  the 
ideals  and  the  Person  of  Christianity.  But  when 
the  scene  is  transformed,  and  Elsmere  takes  the 

I  road  as  a  swashbuckler  himself,  robbing  Little-faiths 

'  in  turn,  the  play  approaches  farce.  Nothing  is  much 
more  significant  of  the  progress  which  less  than 
five-and-twenty  years  have  wrought  in  distinguish- 
ing our  change  from  our  jewels,  than  a  remembrance 
of  the  mighty  pother  which  this  man  of  straw  raised 
upon  religion's  highway.  I  would  not  speak  lightly 
of  the  spiritual  struggle  which  Mrs.  Humphry 
Ward  portrayed ;  many  a  man  found  the  valley 
which  separated  the  land  of  an  authority  dependent 
upon  the  authenticity  of  documents,  from  the  land 
where  he  lives  to-day  in  a  religion  of  the  Spirit, 
organically  joined  to  the  old  and  yet  free  from  its 
mechanisms  and  its  fears,  to  be  a  very  Valley  of 
the  Shadow  of  Death.  He  has  fought  Apollyons 
upon  its  borders  far  more  redoubtable  than  Els- 
mere's  Squire ;  and  he  wonders  from  the  standpoint 
of  present  experience  how  that  worthy  could  in  the 

i  eighties  have  managed  so  earth-shaking  a  tread  that 
prime  ministers  and  bishops  must  needs  be  mar- 
shalled to  oppose  him. 

The  book's   popularity  owed  much  to  literary 
qualities  which  have  given  Mrs.  Ward  a  deservedly 


THE  NEWER   FICTION  519 

high  place  among  contemporary  writers ;  but  it 
owed  as  much  to  her  skilful  choice  and  treatment 
of  a  religious  question  which  was  a  part  of  the 
'  clamour  of  the  time/  For  that  very  reason  it  has 
had  its  day,  and  is  pretty  secure  against  revival, 
since  nothing  is  surer  of  repose  than  a  book  deal- 
ing with  some  over-emphasized  phase  of  a  period 
of  transition.  Yet  the  volume  raises  one  significant 
question  of  literary  ethics,  and  leaves  the  thought- 
ful reader  querying  how  far  it  is  justifiable  to  use 
a  novel  as  a  weapon  in  theological  controversy. 
Robert  Elsmere  was  not  a  very  virile  thinker ;  and 
the  Squire,  backed  by  his  library,  made  short  work 
of  him.  The  wonder  is  what  that  library  could  have 
contained,  and  whether  it  would  have  had  its  way 
quite  so  invincibly  with  a  man  of  better  twisted 
intellectual  fibre  or  more  thorough  grounding  in 
philosophy.  Granting  impregnable  premisses  and 
invincible  arguments,  one  can,  of  course,  prove  any- 
thing; but  one  has  a  right  to  ask  that  the  libraries 
of  fiction  in  which  these  are  contained  should  be 
catalogued  —  at  least  in  an  appendix.  In  spite  of 
these  necessary  strictures,  perhaps  because  of  them, 
I  may  be  permitted  to  add  a  word  of  personal  grati- 
tude to  this  particular  book  and  its  author.  For  in 
the  height  of  its  popularity  it  came  from  a  uni- 
versity friend  to  my  camp  in  a  great  wilderness, 
was  read  by  dim  lights  in  intervals  of  hunting  or 
of  work,  and  found  the  sauce  of  hunger  for  men 
and  books  awaiting  it. 


520  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Lesser  novels  of  a  somewhat  similar  type  have 
been  legion  since  the  rise  of  the  gospel  of  agnosti- 
cism. None  of  them  has  had  any  such  significance  as 
the  work  of  George  Meredith  or  Mr.  Hardy,  which 
stands  in  another  class,  and  has  been  separately  con- 
sidered. Yet  some  have  had  a  wide  reading  and  have 
doubtless  exerted  at  least  a  temporary  influence,  due 
in  no  small  degree  to  the  part  which  religion  plays 
in  them.  Miss  Beatrice  Harraden's  "  Ships  that  Pass 
in  the  Night"  and  Olive  Schreiner's  (Mrs.  Cron- 
wright)  "Story  of  an  African  Farm"  may  serve 
as  types.  The  former  can  be  pretty  summarily  dis- 
missed as  a  debauch  of  sentiment.  Its  brief  popu- 
larity is  not  so  hard  to  understand.  Mr.  William 
James  somewhere  has  a  fine  passage  in  which  he 
describes  the  ethical  inspiration  that  came  to  him 
from  reading  a  story  of  martyrdom.  The  vogue  of 
martyrdom  is  indeed  eternal.  Our  fathers  read  the 
grewsome  details  of  pagan  and  papist  persecution 
in  Foxe,  partly  no  doubt  from  piety,  partly  too  be- 
cause of  their  frank  appeal  to  sensation ;  and,  rude 
though  it  all  was,  there  was  also  something  virile  in 
the  effect.  Hearts  were  warmed  and  blood  reddened. 
They  took  their  pleasure  sadly  in  traditional  English 
fashion ;  but  it  was  gaiety  itself  as  compared  with 
the  exercise  of  reading  Miss  Harraden ;  for  here 
are  no  martyrs,  no  captains  of  their  souls,  but  swim- 
mers in  a  sea  of  blind  circumstance,  —  the  figure  of 
the  ship  is  too  vital,  —  with  barely  energy  enough 
to  make  their  moan  before  they  sink.  Such  books 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  521 

have  sweetness  —  but  it  is  the  sweetness  of  over- 
ripe fruit;  and  tenderness  —  but  it  is  the  softness 
of  decay. 

"  The  Story  of  an  African  Farm  "  is  a  bundle  of 
strange  contradictions,  far  better  calculated  to  rouse 
a  sensation  than  to  produce  an  intelligible  effect, 
though  its  author  is  too  true  an  artist  to  seek  sensa- 
tion for  its  own  sake.  The  African  Farm  itself  is 
nobly  portrayed  and  wins  the  reader's  heart ;  but 
the  canvas  is  better  painted  than  the  picture.  That 
is  in  the  main  a  dance  of  grotesques.  Tant'  Sannie, 
the  Boer  woman,  is  a  mountain  of  flesh  animated 
by  little  but  fleshly  instincts ;  BonaparJ;e  the  hypo- 
crite outdoes  Tartuffe  and  Pecksniff  in  the  extrava- 
gance of  his  Pharisaism ;  while  Lyndall  is  less  human 
than  Undine  herself.  She  has  all  of  Undine's  beauty, 
but  instead  of  Undine's  pensive  longing  for  a  soul, 
her  elflike  person  houses  only  a  bundle  of  nerves 
tortured  into  madness  by  unregulated  vanity  and 
passion.  Gregory  Rose,  who  loves  her,  leaves  the 
faithful  Em  for  her,  and  finally  assumes  woman's 
garb  to  nurse  her  through  a  fatal  illness,  is  an 
effeminate  cad  whose  one  attempt  to  be  heroic  does 
not  escape  the  ridiculous. 

If  the  old  German  overseer  be  numbered  among 
this  impossible  company,  it  must  be  reverently  done, 
and  only  because  he  is  too  good  to  be  true,  with 
a  childlike,  Joe-Gargery^  sort  of  goodness,  which 

^  Of  course  he  lacks  Joe's  humour.  For  reasons  to  be  indicated 
later,  it  is  impossible  that  the  Story  of  an  African  Farm  should  have 
the  humour  of  Great  Expectations. 


522  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

warms  the  heart  and  touches  the  fountains  of  tears. 
Waldo,  the  uncouth  boy,  with  his  mechanical  genius, 
his  dreams,  his  love,  his  great  adventures  of  the  soul, 
and  his  tragedy,  might  conceivably  have  lived;  and 
he,  with  Em —  sturdy,  patient,  necessary  Em  —  and 
the  Farm  itself,  redeems  the  book.  It  could  not  have 
been  written  except  in  a  time  of  religious  transition. 
The  problems  of  a  baffled  faith  are  of  its  essence. 
It  is  reasonably  safe  to  conclude  that  the  author 
had  at  least  a  little  of  controversial  purpose  in  writ- 
ing it,  and  that  it  is  in  some  measure  an  agnostic 
tract.  If  this  be  so  there  is  no  denying  the  power 
with  which  some  incidents  are  told  and  some  argu- 
ments presented ;  nor  any  escape  from  the  con- 
clusion that  in  a  battle  with  hostile  circumstance 
the  only  persons  who  really  seem  adequate  to  the 
struggle,  whether  it  involve  life  or  death,  are  the 
old  German  whose  faith  touched  ecstasy,  and  Em 
with  a  trust  simply  reaching  — 

to  the  level  of  every  day*s 
Most  quiet  need,  by  sun  and  candle  light. 

"  The  Autobiography  of  Mark  Eutherf  ord  "  repre- 
sents another  type  of  theological  character,  intro- 
jspective  and  morbid,  yet  sketched  with  a  delicate 
hand.  It  is  the  story  of  a  dissenting  minister  who 
runs  a  course  parallel  to  that  of  Robert  Elsmere  in 
respect  of  his  opinions,  but  differs  widely  from  him 
in  the  circumstances  of  his  life.  Nervous,  self-con- 
scious, anaemic,  this  man  drifts  from  one  parish  to 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  523 

another,  finding  each  less  lovely  than  the  last ;  find- 
ing, what  is  strangest  of  all,  nothing  in  the  people 
to  whom  he  ministers  really  worthy  of  love,  laughter, 
or  tears ;  swayed  by  doubt,  the  force  of  which  is 
however  hard  to  measure,  because  there  is  so  little 
to  sway  ;  hungering  for  friendship,  but  rarely  able 
to  show  himself  friendly;  pulling  himself  together 
at  last  with  a  modified  and  altruistic  stoicism  which 
serves  him  for  faith,  and  building  a  sort  of  man- 
hood, for  the  construction  of  which  his  career  as  an 
orthodox  believer  seems  to  furnish  neither  clay  nor 
straw.  It  is  safe  to  say  that  no  greater  triumph  of 
drabness  has  ever  been  achieved  in  English  than 
this  Autobiography.  Peter  Ibbetson's  residence  in 
Pentonville  presents  a  riot  of  colour  beside  it.  Yet 
it  is  the  work  of  a  genuine  literary  artist  whose 
purpose  one  may  presume  was  to  narrate  a  soul's 
tragedy.  This  purpose  is  accomplished ;  the  tragedy 
is  as  real  as  any  of  Mr.  Gissing's ;  but  the  whole 
effect  is  weakened  by  the  inherent  flabbiness  of  the 
hero.  If  one  venture  to  pity  (Edipus,  it  is  with  the 
pity  so  close  akin  to  love.  Pity  flows  easily  enough 
into  the  wounds  of  Robert  Elsmere  and  Mark  Ruth- 
erford, each  of  whom  faces  a  situation  as  full  of 
genuine  tragic  possibility ;  but,  alas !  it  is  the  pity 
which  verges  on  contempt. 

Of  Mr.  Mallock,  who  has  chosen  to  cast  numer- 
ous clever  discussions  of  theology  into  the  form  of 
novels,  I  may  not  stop  to  speak,  nor  of  the  growing 
school  of  Modernists  who,  with  Fogazzaro  at  their 


624  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

head,  are  translating  new  theories  of  religious  faith 
and  practice  into  the  speech  of  current  literature, 
and  finding  in  English  an  increasing  host  of  Catho- 
lic as  well  as  Protestant  readers. 

A  word  must,  however,  be  accorded  those  who 
within  recent  years  have  made  one  phase  or  another 
of  the  ^  social  problem '  the  subject  of  their  novels. 
The  device  is  of  course  an  old  one.  "  Uncle  Tom's 
Cabin  "  went  round  the  world ;  Yorkshire  schools 
and  the  Circumlocution  Office  felt  the  influence  of 
Dickens ;  and  nowadays  no  abuse  need  be  so  poor 
as  to  fail  of  its  pamphlet  in  the  form  of  a  novel. 
The  Chicago  stock-yards  have  thus  produced  an 
elaborate  horror  known  as  "  The  Jungle '' ;  while 
Mr.  Jack  London  periodically  prescribes  to  a  sick 
world  his  purge  of  elemental  blood  and  thunder. 
Much  of  this  writing  is  hopelessly  crude  and  tem- 
porary ;  indeed  it  remains  crude  and  temporary  even 
when  produced  by  a  man  of  large  literary  ability  and 
experience  like  the  late  John  Hay,  as  his  "  Bread- 
winners" remains  to  testify.  But  it  is  none  the  less 
significant  both  for  literature  and  religion.  It  sug- 
gests the  channel  in  which  religious  ideas  and  efforts 
are  likely  to  flow  in  steadily  growing  volume.  The 
meaning  of  Christianity  for  the  mind,  heart,  and 
conduct  of  the  individual  in  his  relation  to  God 
and  his  neighbour,  has  been  a  subject  of  the  first 
interest  to  multitudes  of  men  for  centuries.  Its 
influence  in  the  world  has  wroug^ht  immeasurable 
progress.    Yet  in  all  this  time  men  have  but  partly 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  525 

explored  the  content  of  Christ's  message.  The  cur- 
rent religious  unrest  is  largely  due  to  the  fact  that 
new  discoveries  which  will  one  day  furnish  food  for 
man's  soul  have  appeared  and  been  greedily  swal- 
lowed somewhat  faster  than  they  could  be  digested. 
It  is  an  axiom  of  religion  and  physical  science  that 
all  truth  is  wholesome.  But  truth  is  something  more 
than  facts,  just  as  speech  is  something  more  than 
words.  Truth  comes  from  facts  in  right  relation; 
and  the  mistake  against  which  religion  and  physical 
science  must  both  be  on  their  guard,  is  the  hasty 
assumption  that  every  new  and  significant  hypothesis 
is  the  truth.  In  all  probability,  if  it  be  very  signifi- 
cant and  seem  to  chime  well  with  great  experiences 
that  have  hitherto  been  mysterious,  it  is  a  happy 
and  really  scientific  guess  to  be  generously  but  still 
tentatively  accepted  and  modified  in  the  light  of 
further  experience.  At  times  there  come  a  succes- 
sion of  such  hypotheses  in  notable  conjunction  in 
the  realm  of  science ;  and  we  know  that  we  are  upon 
the  verge  of  great  advance.  So  there  come  times 
when  the  attention  of  thoughtful  men  is  focussed 
upon  some  problem  of  ethics  or  philosophy;  and 
we  are  confident  that,  however  difficult  it  be,  new 
and  significant  steps  toward  its  solution  are  to  be 
taken. 

It  is  such  a  condition  as  this  that  we  face  in 
religion,  politics,  and  literature.  Christians  are  dis- 
cerning the  wider  social  meanings  of  their  faith; 
statesmen  are  considering  problems  of  social  welfare 


526  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

as  problems  of  the  state,  which  had  hitherto  seemed 
foreign  to  it ;  and  literature  is  concerning  itself 
with  human  brotherhood  or  the  lack  of  it  as  never 
before/ 

The  crudeness  of  much  of  this  work,  upon  which 
I  have  already  remarked,  was  to  be  expected,  partly 
because  men's  passions  were  so  deeply  involved  as 
to  render  balance  and  restraint  difficult.  Kingsley's 
"  Yeast "  deserved  its  name,  so  thoroughly  did  its 
social  ferment  infect  the  writer's  style.  But  as  time 
has  passed,  a  few  men  of  large  intellectual  and  moral 
stature  have  undertaken,  or  been  driven  by  circum- 
stances, to  work  in  this  medium.  Of  these  the  late 
George  Gissing  is  perhaps  the  most  significant 
among  English  writers.  Robert  Elsmere  and  Mark 
Rutherford  found  refuge  for  their  heresies  in  some 
form  of  '  social-settlement '  work ;  so  far  forth  faith- 
fully reflecting  the  trend  of  religious  thought  in 
their  day.  Mr.  Gissing's  "  The  Nether  World  " — 
for  I  shall  let  that  book  represent  him  —  seems  at 
first  glance  to  be  without  God  and  without  hope ; 
indeed  he  might  have  said  that  the  first  glance  gave 
the  true  index  to  its  state.  The  land  to  which  he 
invites  his  reader  is  a  "  land  of  darkness,  as  dark- 
ness itself ;  and  of  the  shadow  of  death,  without  any 
order,  and  where  the  light  is  as  darkness."  It  is 
darkness  beyond  the  power  of  social  settlements  to 

*  In  a  suggestive  article  in  the  Hihbert  Journal  for  October,  1908, 
Prof.  A.  C.  McGifPert  has  discussed  at  length  the  religious  signifi- 
cance of  the  recent  social  awakening. 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  627 

dissipate,  and  even  the  rush-light  of  the  occasional 
charity-worker  but  serves  to  make  it  visible. 

The  story's  texture  is  too  close  and  firm  to  make 
any  sketch  of  it  quite  intelligible ;  yet,  since  it  is 
never  likely  to  be  '  popular,'  a  word  about  its  sahent 
features  is  necessary.  Almost  without  relief  the 
reader  haunts  the  more  dismal  streets  of  London ; 
or,  if  he  be  permitted  to  visit  provincial  towns,  it  is 
to  find  them  drearier  still.  Even  when  he  goes  holi- 
day-making, it  is  to  the  Crystal "  Paliss,"  in  a  superb 
chapter  whose  character  may  be  gathered  from  its 
title,  "  lo  Saturnalia  !  "  Only  once  is  there  a  glimpse 
of  gracious  country  quiet,  and  this  is  but  the  calm 
preceding  a  storm  of  sordid  tragedy.  We  discern  the 
heroine  in  a  child,  Jane,  an  under-fed,  half -clothed, 
kitchen  drudge,  who  is  treated  with  heart-breaking 
cruelty  by  her  two  mistresses,  a  Mrs.  Peckover  and 
her  daughter  Clem.  The  latter  comes  close  to  being 
a  great  character ;  of  the  panther  type,  with  her 
full-bodied  sensuous  beauty,  her  stealth,  cruelty,  and 
savage  power  to  love  or  hate,  she  almost  kills  poor 
Jane.  The  child  is  first  befriended  by  a  young 
artisan,  and  then  rescued  by  her  grandfather,  who 
hides  his  possession  of  wealth  behind  the  semblance 
of  poverty  while  he  dreams  great  dreams  of  social  re- 
generation which  his  money  shall  finally  accomplish. 
With  this  end  in  view  he  rears  his  granddaughter  in 
a  sort  of  austere  comfort,  until  she  appears  before 
us  as  a  working-girl  of  the  finest  type,  unassum- 
ing, gentle,  serious,  of  keen  intelligence,  and  high 


528  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

though  modest  purpose.  She  has  been  thrown  much 
with  the  young  workingman  who  befriended  her 
wretched  childhood,  and  a  natural  love  wakes  in 
each.  It  looks  for  one  bright  moment  as  though  an 
eminently  fitting  match  might  come  of  it,  for  Sidney 
is  a  man  of  character  and  sterling  worth.  But  the 
father  of  Jane  —  an  oily  rascal  of  the  cheap  com- 
mercial type  —  comes  back  from  America  ;  is  put 
upon  the  trail  of  his  father's  secret  fortune,  and 
schemes  to  get  it.  Temporary  misunderstanding 
separates  Jane  and  Sidney;  the  latter  learns  of  the 
money  and  regards  it  as  an  obstacle ;  there  re- 
enters, too,  a  girl  whom  he  had  once  loved  and 
whose  family  he  had  befriended  —  a  girl  then  as 
beautiful  as  she  was  vain  and  intensely  ambitious. 
She  had  sacrificed  her  honour,  partly  in  a  sort  of 
desperate  protest  against  the  misery  of  her  family 
life,  and  partly  as  a  possible  means  of  getting  ou 
along  the  path  to  the  stage,  where  she  had  the  am- 
bition, and  presumably  the  power,  to  shine ;  but 
just  as  success  seemed  to  hold  out  the  hand  of  in- 
vitation, an  angry  rival  threw  vitriol  in  her  face  and 
balked  her  hopes  forever.  There  were  no  large  re- 
sources in  her  nature,  though  all  the  old  elements 
of  restlessness  and  vanity  remained  ;  and  she  went 
back  to  her  father's  house  in  black  despair.  The 
story  of  her  family,  the  Hewetts,  is  one  of  the  great 
features  of  the  book,  with  its  poverty,  its  bitterness, 
its  patience  in  the  character  of  the  mother,  its  rebel- 
lion against  fate  in  that  of  the  father,  its  contribu- 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  629 

tion  to  the  criminal  classes  in  the  person  of  the  clever 
but  self-willed  brother,  Bob,  and  the  half-humour- 
ous and  altogether  pathetic  figure  of  Bob's  wife, 
Penny  loaf. 

Sidney,  partly  from  chivalrous  pity  and  partly 
from  a  reawakening  of  the  old  affection,  marries  the 
disfigured  Clara.  Hewett,  who  through  misfortune, 
nervous  stress,  bad  food,  and  somewhat  irregular 
habits,  is  now  nearly  past  work,  but  who  still  has 
two  young  and  ill-trained  children  dependent  on 
him,  becomes  with  them  dependent  on  his  son-in- 
law;  who  in  his  turn  finds  the  demands  of  an 
increasing  and  wasteful  family,  presided  over  by  a 
wife  with  neither  the  experience  nor  the  character  to 
be  a  genuine  housekeeper,  not  only  outrunning  his 
earnings  but  dissipating  his  savings.  Yet  through 
it  all  he  struggles  to  keep  his  courage  and  to  make 
his  life  of  use,  even  though  the  old  ambitions  must 
be  forever  dismissed  and  a  future  of  poverty  deepen- 
ing to  distress  faced.  Jane's  grandfather  meanwhile 
had  died ;  her  graceless  father  has  gained  possession 
of  the  property  and  lost  it ;  and  she,  without  regret, 
except  perhaps  that  her  grandfather's  dreams  have 
vanished,  takes  up  quietly  and  with  womanly  dignity 
the  task  of  winning  her  daily  bread  again. 

The  last  pages  of  the  book  find  Jane  and  Sidney 
standing  beside  the  old  visionary's  grave  in  Abney 
Park  Cemetery,  where  they  had  met  by  chance. 

"When  they  had  stood  in  silence  for  a  while,^ 
Jane  told  of  her  father's  death  and  its  circum- 


530  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

stances.  She  told  him,  too,  of  Pennyloaf 's  humble 
security. 

"  ^  You  have  kept  well  all  the  year  ? '  he  asked. 

"  '  And  you,  too,  I  hope? ' 

"  Then  they  bade  each  other  good-bye.  .  . 

"  In  each  life  little  for  congratulation.  He  with 
the  ambitions  of  his  youth  frustrated ;  neither  an 
artist  nor  a  leader  of  men  in  the  battle  of  justice. 
She,  no  saviour  of  society  by  the  force  of  a  superb 
example;  no  daughter  of  the  people,  holding  wealth 
in  trust  for  the  people's  needs.  Yet  to  both  was 
their  work  given.  Unmarked,  unencouraged  save 
by  their  love  of  uprightness  and  mercy,  they  stood 
by  the  side  of  those  more  hapless,  brought  some 
comfort  to  hearts  less  courageous  than  their  own. 
Where  they  abode  it  was  not  all  dark.  Sorrow  cer- 
tainly awaited  them,  perchance  defeat  in  even  the 
humble  aims  that  they  had  set  themselves ;  but  at 
least  their  lives  would  remain  a  protest  against  those 
brute  forces  of  society  which  fill  with  wreck  the 
abysses  of  the  nether  world." 

"  Where  they  abode  it  was  not  all  dark '' ;  this 
is  the  one  ray  of  everlasting  light  which  pierces  the 
abyss.  Mr.Gissinghas  been  called  the  "  Spokesman 
of  Despair."  It  is  a  mistake.  He  is  rather,  when  at  his 
best,  a  great  master  of  tragedy,  the  essence  of  which 
consists  in  picturing  a  soul  contending  against  floods 
of  hostile  circumstance  and  retaining  its  essential 
integrity. 

Here,  and  in  his  deep  feeling  for  the  misery  of 
submerged  life,  is  to  be  found  the  religious  signifi- 
cance of  Gissing  and  some  of  the  lesser  authors  of 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  531 

his  type.  His  explicit  references  to  religion  are  rare ; 
though  in  "  The  Nether  World  "  there  is  a  madman 
who  loves  to  sing  the  praises  of  the  Lord  in  squalid 
alleys  as  though  to  point  life's  irony.  Mad  Jack  has 
just  a  trifle  too  much  method  in  his  madness  to  be 
convincing  as  a  lunatic ;  but  as  a  literary  device  he 
does  his  author's  bidding  perfectly;  and  the  reader 
is  not  likely  to  forget  the  scene  where  the  coun- 
terfeiter and  would-be  murderer,  Bob,  under  arrest 
and  dying,  is  borne  on  a  stretcher  from  his  misera- 
ble lodging,  while  Mad  Jack  chants  by  the  wayside, 
"All  ye  works  of  the  Lord,  bless  ye  the  Lord; 
praise  Him  and  magnify  Him  forever ! " 

Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  has  said  that  we  must  make 
a  religion  of  socialism.^  This  may  be,  although  Mr. 
Shaw  himself  seems  somewhat  unfitted  by  nature 
for  the  role  of  a  self -forgetful  apostle.  Yet  whether 
it  be  or  not,  there  is  no  question  that  certain  re- 
ligious elements  appear  in  Gissing's  treatment  of 
society  and  the  problems  which  oppress  it.  Once 
at  least  he  expressed  regret  that  he  could  not  give 
larger  place  to  religious  aspiration  and  motive  in 
his  work.  "  If  I  could  write  a  book  that  recoofnized 
the  spiritual  side  of  man,  where  I  now  appeal  to 
one  reader,  I  should  then  speak  to  thousands,"^  he 
confessed  to  a  friend.  There  is,  however,  an  ethi- 
cal and  even  spiritual  note  in  his  most  significant 

1  Atlantic  Monthly,  February,  1909,  p.  234. 

2  "Some  Recollections  of  George  Gissing,"  Gentleman's  MagO' 
dncj  Febmaxy,  1906,  p.  14. 


532  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

work,  which  might  have  reassured  him.  At  least 
one  critic  of  "  The  Whirlpool "  (Mr.  H.  G.  Wells) 
has  felt  the  change  in  Rolfe's  way  of  thinking  to  be 
emblematic  of  a  like  wholesome  change  for  society. 

"It  is  the  discovery  of  the  insufficiency  of  the 
cultivated  life  and  its  necessary  insincerities ;  it  is  a 
return  to  the  essential,  to  honourable  struggle  as 
the  epic  factor  in  life,  to  children  as  the  matter  of 
morality,  and  the  sanction  of  the  securities  of  civi- 
lization.''^ 

^  "The  Novels  of  Mr.  George  Gissing,"  Contemporary  Review, 
August,  1897. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

THE   NEWER  FICTION.    U 

One  class  remains.  It  includes  those  novels  or  other 
works  of  the  imagination  which  deal  ostensibly  per- 
haps with  adventure  or  manners,  but  really  with 
Life,  and  after  a  fashion  so  touched  by  faith  or 
doubt  as  to  leave  a  definite  religious  and  ethical 
impression.  The  great  names  here  are  those  of 
George  Meredith  ^  and  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy ;  and 
their  bare  mention  seems  like  the  proffer  of  good 
wine  at  the  feast's  end.  With  Meredith  I  should 
group  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  and  Mr.  Rudyard 
Kipling;  while  Mr.  Eden  Phillpotts  seconds  Mr. 
Hardy. 

Much  that  has  been  said  of  George  Meredith's 
poetry  might  be  repeated  concerning  his  prose.  It 
is  characterized  by  the  same  courage,  insight,  sanity, 
and  vigour;  it  is  marred  by  similar  mannerisms, 
self-assertions,  and  wilful  obscurities ;  the  reader  of 
prose  as  well  as  poetry  being  sure  of  more  or  less 
contemptuous  treatment  at  his  author's  hand.  It  is 

*  Measured  by  the  calendar  Mr.  Meredith  belongs,  of  course,  with 
the  mid- Victorians  ;  but  his  popular  recognition  came  so  late,  and 
the  sources  of  his  youth  seem  so  perennial,  that  there  is  no  ana- 
chronism in  placing  him  here. 


534  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

hurt  too  by  an  excess  of  subtlety  which  seems  like 
the  exercise  of  ingenuity  for  its  own  sake/  and  by 
an  almost  intolerable  tendency  to  indulge  in  apho- 
rism. There  has  been  in  English  just  one  writer  who 
could  afford  to  make  a  business  of  coining  aphorisms 
— and  that  man  was  Tupper.  T upper  was  an  honest 
son  of  toil  who  made  proverbs  as  other  men  dig  po- 
tatoes or  mend  roads.  If  at  times  he  mounted  the 
tripod  and  invited  a  sort  of  mantic  fury,  or  assumed 
the  bearing  of  a  seventh  son  of  a  seventh  son,  no- 
body thought  the  less  of  him ;  to  open  his  mouth  in 
parables  and  to  utter  dark  sayings  of  old  was  a  part 
of  the  day's  work ;  and  even  when  the  dark  saying 
proved — as  it  generally  did — to  be  a  platitude,  this 
too  was  borne  with  as  belonging  to  the  lot  of  proverb- 
makers.  Jewels  are  one  of  nature's  by-products; 
the  best  of  them  are  found,  not  made ;  the  process 
of  fabrication  is  a  suspicious  one ;  and  even  profes- 
sional search  for  them  is  a  precarious  occupation. 
It  requires  the  whole  of  Emerson's  moral  and  spirit- 
ual power  to  make  even  his  artificial  multiplication 
of  aphorisms  tolerable.  With  George  Meredith  it 
frankly  ceased  to  be  tolerable  at  all,  his  frequent 
recourse  to  the  "  Pilgrim's  Scrip"  in  "Richard  Fev- 
erel "  heavily  penalizing  the  reader  of  that  admira- 
ble book.  This  is  not  to  say  that  his  aphorisms  are 

^  Cf.  the  criticism  of  Prof.  J.  M.  Manly  in  his  English  Poetry ^ 
1170-1892 :  "  But  the  gods  gave  him  also  the  fatal  gift  of  excessive 
intellectual  ingenuity  and  a  delight  in  the  exercise  of  it  ;  while 
the  sole  gift  they  denied  him  was  self-restraint." 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  535 

of  the  Tapper  sort.  Many  of  them  are  extremely 
clever,  and  many  others  sound  as  though  they  might 
be  if  their  meaning  could  be  discovered ;  but  the 
fact  remains  that  their  pursuit  or  fabrication  for 
their  own  sake  is  always  a  blemish  on  the  work  of 
genius.  It  is  the  antithesis  of  Shakespeare's  method ; 
gorgeously  adorned  though  his  style  often  is,  the 
jewels  seem  all  to  be  turned  up  naturally  in  the  field 
which  he  is  cultivating.  They  are  of  the  essence  of 
his  matter.  So  much  of  George  Meredith's  wealth 
comes  in  the  same  legitimate  way,  that  it  is  the 
greater  pity  to  find  him  so  often  indulging  in 
adornments  of  manner  which,  however  splendid 
they  may  be,  must  still  remain  artificial. 

Something  of  this  same  tendency  to  overdo  what 
he  might  do  almost  perfectly  appears  occasionally 
in  his  love-scenes  and  his  accompanying  descrip- 
tions of  Nature.  The  love-making  of  Richard  Fev- 
erel  and  Lucy  is  deservedly  famous;  yet  the  sum- 
mer and  the  maid  both  suffer  from  a  luxuriance  of 
sweetness  that  comes  perilously  near  to  a  surfeit. 

When  all  this  has  been  said,  however,  we  have  to 
acknowledge  in  George  Meredith  a  great  creator  of 
character,  a  true  master  of  life's  secrets,  and  a  trust- 
worthy guide  along  the  way  to  such  triumphs  as 
are  possible  to  man.  He  is  no  professional  preacher; 
yet  the  religious  and  ethical  note  is  sounded  on 
nearly  every  page  of  his  most  characteristic  work. 
This  work  may  perhaps  be  best  represented  by  "  The 
Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel"  and  "The Egoist."  The 


536  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

former  is,  no  doubt,  the  better  story.  It  moves  with 
force  and  vigour ;  its  tragedy  and  comedy  alike  be- 
long to  life;  its  chief  characters  remain  as  com- 
panions* after  the  book  has  been  laid  aside.  Every 
father  instinctively  takes  warning  by  Sir  Austin  and 
his  system  ;  every  would-be  man  of  the  world  by 
Adrian,  whose  clever  selfishness,  without  abating 
jot  or  tittle  of  its  spirit,  is  unmasked  with  complete 
effectiveness ;  every  boy  who  would  master  circum- 
stance finds  in  Richard  a  comrade  whose  great 
chance  for  victory  is  frustrated  because  he  has  not 
learned  that  self -conquest  must  come  first;  and  this 
is  still  true,  whether  the  fault  be  assigned  to  Rich- 
ard himself  or  to  Sir  Austin  and  the  System.  To  the 
"Pilgrim's  Scrip"  I  have  already  paid  my  disre- 
spects ;  but  this  too  is  a  mine  of  wisdom  for  those 
who  can  stomach  the  soil  in  which  they  have  to  dig. 
The  average  reader  and  the  critic  alike  are  dis- 
posed to  balk  at  a  too  frank  display  of  the  moral  in 
a  fable.  Yet  he  must  be  hypercritical  indeed  who 
does  not  admire  the  perfect  frankness  and  the  con- 
summate ability  of  the  chapter  in  which  Sir  Austin 
Feverel,  visiting  London  in  search  of  a  bride  for 
Richard,  confers  incidentally  with  two  old  friends. 
Both  were  Members  of  Parliament,  "  useful  men, 
though  gouty,  who  had  sown  in  their  time  a  fine 
crop  of  wild  oats,  and  advocated  the  advantage  of 
doing  so,  seeing  that  they  did  not  fancy  themselves 
the  worse  for  it."  He  found  one  with  an  imbecile 
son  and  the  other  with  consumptive  daughters.  "  So 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  637 

much,"  he  wrote  in  the  Note-book,  "  for  the  Wild 
Oats  '  theory.'  "  He  meets  the  eldest  of  the  charm- 
ing but  hectic  girls,  and  the  degenerate  boy ;  who 
almost  persuade  him  to  mount  the  pulpit  and  cry 
aloud  his  convictions  upon  wild  oats  and  their 
harvest.  "  This  universal  igfnorance  of  the  inevita- 
ble  consequence  of  sin  is  frightful,"  he  says  to  him- 
self. "  The  wild  oats  plea  is  a  torpedo  that  seems 
to  have  struck  the  world  and  rendered  it  morally 
insensible." 

Though  Mr.  Meredith  is  rarely  so  explicit,  this 
whole  chapter  entitled  "  The  System  Encounters 
the  Wild  Oats  Special  Plea,"  is  fairly  representa- 
tive of  his  ethical  tone.  It  is  as  wholesome  as  ripe 
nuts,  possessing  at  once  substance  and  flavour. 

"  Richard  Feverel"  deals  with  life  as  a  thing  of 
deeds  and  ethical  relations;  "  The  Egoist"  searches 
the  hearts  and  tries  the  reins  of  the  children  of 
men.  It  is  in  some  respects  less  possible  than  "  Rich- 
ard Feverel" ;  in  others  it  is  more  intimate  and 
real.  No  fool  could  ever  be  so  wise,  nor  any  wise 
man  such  a  fool,  as  Sir  Willoughby  Patterne;  and 
yet  the  reader  who  fails  to  see  at  times  that  he  is 
looking  in  a  mirror,  as  he  traces  the  processes  of 
Sir  Willoughby 's  respectable  folly,  has  cause  to 
distrust  his  eyesight.  He  will  feel  the  exaggeration 
of  the  character  and  be  often  on  the  point  of  ex- 
claiming against  it,  only  to  discover  that  all  uncon- 
sciously a  window  has  been  opened  into  his  own 
soul,  and  that  the  thing  which  he  is  about  to  decry 


538  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

has  the  most  intimate  and  indubitable  reality.  To 
read  "  The  Egoist "  discerningly  is  to  undergo 
conviction  of  sin,  but  in  a  warm  bath  of  humour 
which  mitigates  its  rigour.  The  whole  realm  of  fic- 
tion scarcely  contains  so  humbling  and  yet  so  good- 
natured  a  book.  It  is  a  book  to  dwell  upon ;  its 
minor  characters  and  features  all  have  significance ; 
even  though  thrown  into  an  unduly  high  light  for 
the  moment,  they  generally  bear  examination  and 
justify  themselves  under  it.  The  sprightliness  of 
Colonel  DeCraye  and  the  pedantic  pomposity  of 
Dr.  Middleton,  are,  to  be  sure,  somewhat  too  con- 
tinuous and  self-consistent ;  but  who  dare  bring 
any  charge  against  the  hero-worship  of  the  ladies, 
Eleanor  and  Isabel,  and  the  maiden-aunt  agility 
with  which  they  execute  a  volte-face  at  Sir  Wil- 
loughby's  bidding ;  it  being  true,  of  course,  that 
this  loyalty  to  another  is  itself  but  a  refined  and 
glorified  egoism,  since  he  is  their  Nephew,  they  his 
Aunts,  and  all  together  live,  move,  and  have  their 
being  in  the  sacred  and  sustaining  medium  of  the 
Family.  Laetitia  and  Clara  are  both  women  whom 
the  reader  writes  down  gladly  in  his  list  of  friends  ; 
not  so  much  because  they  are  wholly  admirable,  as 
because  their  very  faults  are  those  of  an  altogether 
human  and  feminine  inconsistency.  Crossjay  is  a 
real  and  engaging  boy,  and  Mrs.  Mountstuart  Jen- 
kinson,  though  far  too  infallibly  clever,  is,  as  Cho- 
rus, worthy  of  a  place  beside  Mrs.  Cadwallader  in 
"  Middlemarch." 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  539 

Here,  too,  as  in  "  Kichard  Feverel,"  there  is  no 
concealment  of  the  ethical  —  I  should  even  venture 
to  add  the  spiritual  —  significance  of  the  story  as  a 
whole.  Vernon  Whitford  is  no  prig ;  he  is  simply 
a  plain  man  with  excellent  intellectual  equipment, 
high  courage,  and  an  honest  conviction  or  two. 
These  convictions,  singularly  enough,  seem  close 
akin  to  those  of  a  Teacher  Who  said,  "  Blessed  are 
the  meek,"  —  though  never,  as  some  seem  to  sup- 
pose, "Blessed  are  the  mawkish," — and  again, 
"  What  is  a  man  profited  if  he  shall  gain  the  whole 
world,  and  lose  his  own  soul  ?  "  They  appear,  more- 
over, to  be  the  convictions,  not  of  Vernon  Whitford 
merely,  but  of  his  creator  and  author.  He  does  not 
translate  them  into  conventional  relio^ious  or  ethical 
speech,  but  in  his  own  fashion  he  is  ever  setting  his 
readers  face  to  face  with  new  incarnations  of  their 
truth.  The  men  and  women  who  people  his  novels 
are  characters  instead  of  puppets  ;  they  have  wills 
to  use  and  use  them  ;  choices  to  make  and  make 
them;  wherever  they  are,  their  presence  is  signifi- 
cant; the  scene  which  they  people  gains  reality  and 
takes  on  meaning  from  them ;  they  dominate  in- 
stead of  merely  adorning  it.  Tragedy  and  comedy 
are  possible,  because  personality  is  real.  The  reader 
feels  the  will  to  live,  and  to  control  circumstance  in 
the  interests  of  the  larger  life  of  himself  and  his 
fellows,  refreshed  in  him. 

This  same  message  —  if  ^  message '  be  not  too 
homiletic  a  term  —  is  delivered  by  Stevenson  and 


540  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Kipling.  Neither  is  a  great  novelist.  "  Treasure 
Island,"  the  story  of  pure  adventure,  retains  its  pri- 
macy for  me  among  Stevenson's  novels ;  and,  with 
the  exception  of  "Kim,"  Mr.  Kipling  can  scarcely 
be  said  to  have  written  novels  at  all.  But  in  both  the 
will  to  live  appears;  the  dominion  of  man  over  cir- 
cumstance asserts  itself.  So  strong  is  this  assertion 
indeed  that  in  one  instance  the  former  laid  himself 
open  to  criticism  by  seeming  to  dwarf  a  character 
in  order  to  give  circumstance  a  chance.^ 

It  is  in  the  essays,  tales,  and  letters,  however, 
that  Stevenson  reveals  the  finer  qualities  of  his 
imagination  ;  to  which,  at  the  risk  of  being  laughed 
at,  I  should  unhesitatingly  add  one  of  the  Fables. 
Their  author  suspected  his  possession  of  a  special 
gift  for  this  sort  of  writing,  which  of  itself  might 
lead  us  to  look  askance  at  it;  and  some  critics 
would  gladly  rule  the  Fables  out  of  the  canon  of 
his  works.  They  are,  to  be  sure,  fragmentary  and 
somewhat  crude  ;  yet  "  The  House  of  Eld  "remains 
a  thing  of  singular,  though  as  yet  half-recognized, 
power.  The  casual  reader  may  accept  or  reject  it 
as  a  grim  setting  forth  of  the  burden  which  reli- 
gion often  lays  on  men ;  a  second  glance  should  suf- 
fice to  show  that  the  emphasis  really  falls  upon  the 
inevitable  affinity  of  the  soul  for  faith.  Religion 
may  indeed  become  a  fetter ;  in  the  Fable,  Jack, 
to  be  rid  of  it,  slays  his  father,  mother,  and  uncle. 

*  The  younger  brother  in  The  Master  of  Ballantrae.     Compare 
Sir  Leslie  Stephen's  criticism,  in  his  essay  on  Stevenson. 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  641 

The  gyve  drops  from  his  leg;  but  almost  in  his  own 
despite  he  stoops,  Hfts  it,  and  lays  it  in  his  bosom. 
As  he  returns  along  the  highway,  it  is  to  discover 
that  the  people  whom  he  meets  have  been  delivered, 
even  as  he,  from  the  shackle  upon  the  right  ankle, 
but  only  to  lose  no  time  in  clasping  another  upon 
the  left ;  and  to  his  questions  they  reply,  "  that 
was  the  new  wear,  for  the  old  was  found  to  be  a 
superstition."  Then  he  looked  at  them  again  and 
saw  that  the  new  fetter  was  eating  like  an  ulcer  into 
the  left  ankle,  while  the  wound  upon  the  right  was 
not  yet  healed. 

Old  is  the  tree  and  the  fruit  good, 
Very  old  and  thick  the  wood. 
Woodman,  is  your  courage  stout  ? 
Beware  !  the  root  is  wrapped  about 
Your  mother's  heart,  your  father's  bones  ; 
And  like  the  mandrake,  comes  with  groans. 

So,  in  characteristically  lame  verse,  he  points  his 
fable's  moral.  The  thing  is  true  within  the  limits 
which  he  sets  it.  Faith  with  its  fruitage  of  good 
works  is  for  man's  sustenance ;  it  is  as  germane  to 
his  experience  and  his  need  as  bread;  yet  it  may  be 
treated,  not  as  the  living  source  of  deeds,  but  as  a 
dead  and  completed  system  of  beliefs  or  forms, 
when  it  becomes  a  burden  for  his  shoulders  and  a 
shackle  upon  his  freedom.  If  then  he  tries  to  get 
rid  by  violence  of  the  whole  thing,  behold  it  is  only 
to  exchange  a  burden  of  formal  rehgion  for  a  bur- 
den of  superstition,  or  to  shift  a  shackle  from  one 


542  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

leg  to  the  other.  Even  the  man  who  seems  to  suc- 
ceed in  complete  emancipation,  yet  carries  the  old 
fetter  as  a  memento  in  his  bosom,  and  sits  down  in 
a  lone  house  sometimes  to  weep  beside  the  bodies 
of  those  whom  his  iconoclastic  zeal  has  slain. 

The  truth  is  almost  savagely  put  in  the  parable ; 
but  it  is  echoed  in  more  gracious  terms  again  and 
again  in  poem,  essay,  and  letter.  Stevenson  was  as 
true  a  Scotsman  as  ever  lived  in  his  appetite  for 
reHgious  discourse.  His  expression  of  it  was  of 
course  unconventional,  but  his  taste  for  its  sub- 
stance was  sound. 

For  still  the  Lord  is  Lord  of  might ; 
In  deeds,  in  deeds,  he  takes  delight, 

was,  no  doubt,  of  the  essence  of  his  faith.  Yet  he 
was  no  mere  Son  of  Thunder  singing  the  praises  of  an 
almighty  demon  of  energy.  There  is  a  spirit  in  man, 
born  of  God,  which  welcomes  life's  adventure,  its 
bitter  with  its  sweet,  confident  that  some  secret  of 
mastery  exists  for  such  as  can  discern  it. 

His  ears  were  always  open  to  the  more  sombre 
notes  in  "  the  still  sad  music  of  humanity  "  ;  and  in 
the  "Memoirs  of  an  Islet"  there  is  explicit  refer- 
ence to  his  youthful  sensibility  to  the  Franco-Prus- 
sian war,  then  in  progress,  and  its  suggestion  of 
"  that  other  war  which  is  as  old  as  mankind,  and  is 
indeed  the  life  of  man  :  .  .  .  the  grinding  slavery  of 
competition  ;  the  toil  of  seventy  years,  dear-bought 
bread,  precarious  honour,  the  perils  and  pitfalls, 
and  the  poor  rewards."    This  is  exactly  the  vision 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  643 

which  seems  to  have  driven  so  many  generous  minds 
mad  with  pessimism ;  but  Stevenson  was  rescued,  as 
he  thought,  by  his  own  experience  of  suffering  and 
acquaintance  with  an  ever-hovering  death. 

"I  used  myself  to  rage  when  I  saw  sick  folk 
going  by  in  their  Bath-chairs ;  since  I  have  been 
sick  myself  (and  always  when  I  was  sick  myself),  I 
found  life,  even  in  rough  places,  to  have  a  property 
of  easiness.  That  which  we  suffer  ourselves,  has 
no  longer  the  same  air  of  monstrous  injustice  and 
wanton  cruelty  that  suffering  wears  when  we  see  it 
in  the  case  of  others."^ 

This  consciousness  of  a  something  in  man  that 
dominates  the  body  and  can  transmute  all  experi-  ^ 
ence  into  good  or  ill,  was  part  and  parcel  of  every- 
thing he  wrote ;  even  his  dreams  were  haunted  by 
it,  as  "  Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde,"  which  was  the 
elaboration  of  a  dream,  remains  to  testify.  This  is  of 
course  a  latter-day  echo,  in  rather  grewsome  tones, 
of  Plato's  two  daemons,  and  its  essential  truth  to 
experience  was  demonstrated  b}'^  its  welcome  not 
merely  from  those  who  coveted  a  shudder,  but  from 
thoughtful  folk  who  saw  in  it  a  mirror  held  up  to 
nature  —  a  magic  mirror  with  power  to  reflect  even 
the  spectres  which  haunt  our  souls. 

No  one  can  read  Stevenson  or  Kipling  without 
sharing,  at  least  for  the  time,  their  conviction  of  a 
creative  and  masterful  power  underlying  appear-  ^ 
ances.    Whether  it  be  called  human  or  divine,  men- 

1  Letter  to  William  Archer,  October  30,  1885. 


544  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

tal  or  spiritual,  makes  relatively  little  difference ; 
it  is  characterized  by  a  self-conscious  will,  which, 
even  while  transcending  our  definitions,  impinges 
most  significantly  upon  our  experience.  This  makes 
on  the  one  hand  for  reverence  and  on  the  other 
for  courage,  since  it  at  once  humbles  and  embold- 
ens men.  In  Kipling,  for  instance,  the  might  of 
the  sea  is  always  asserting  itself  against  the  phys- 
ical impotence  of  man,  who  yet  overcomes  and 
subdues  it  to  his  service.  He  may  of  course  be 
physically  beaten  in  the  conflict,  but,  even  so,  wins 
a  genuine  victory  so  long  as  he  maintains  the  in- 
tegrity of  his  soul.  Hence  the  interest  of  both 
writers  in  such  adventures  as  Gloucester  fishermen 
or  the  builders  of  the  Northern  Lights  experienced; 
hence,  too,  Stevenson's  essays  "  JEs  Triplex  "  and 
^*The  English  Admirals." 

Their  common  love  of  the  ghostly  is  but  a  mood 
of  the  same  feeling  for  the  spiritual,  and  ranges 
from  the  horror  of  "  Thrawn  Janet"  or  "At  the 
End  of  the  Passage "  to  the  delicate  beauty  of 
"  The  Brushwood  Boy  "  and  "  They."  The  highly 
figurative  language  of  Scripture  has  had  its  way 
with  both,  and  both  in  turn  have  made  their  con- 
tributions to  the  literature  of  devotion,  Stevenson 
in  the  "  Vailima  Prayers"  and  Kipling  in  his 
"  Recessional." 

Widely  as  I  feel  compelled  to  differ  from  the 
bitter  philosophy  which  undermines  so  much  of  Mr. 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  545 

Hardy's  work,  it  is  well-uigh  as  difficult  to  point 
a  critical  pen  at  him  as  at  Wordsworth  himself; 
and  for  a  similar  reason.  Other  writers  may  have 
painted  as  charming  landscapes,  or  'described  Na- 
ture '  with  as  great  accuracy,  or  framed  their  work 
as  elaborately  in  its  surroundings  of  earth,  sky,  and 
season ;  but  these  two  stand  together  and  preeminent 
in  their  identification  of  Nature  with  the  lot  of  man. 
When  Wordsworth  thinks  of  the  sheepfold  which 
Michael  reared  with  such  painful  art  and  finally  left 
unfinished,  he  sees  in  it  something  more  than  a  pic- 
ture of  a  broken  life.  The  rough  ground  and  waiting 
stones  seem  instinct  with  a  spirit  which  consorts  with 
that  of  the  broken-hearted  shepherd.  So,  when  the 
poet  listens  to  the  sea,  it  is  more  than  a  rolling  and 
breakinor  surf  that  he  hears :  — 

Listen !  the  mighty  Being  is  awake. 
And  doth  with  his  eternal  motion  make 
A  sound  like  thunder  —  everlastingly. 

In  like  manner  Mr.  Hardy,  looking  at  the  grey  up- 
land where  Tess  and  her  girl  companion  work  in  the 
turnip-field,  sees  something  more  than  the  spacious 
bleakness  portending  snow  ;  he  communes  with  the 
very  Spirit  of  Winter,  which  not  merely  possesses 
the  fields  but  struggles  for  possession  of  the  wo- 
man's life.  In  "  The  Dynasts,"  a  work  whose  gen- 
uine power  goes  far  toward  atoning  for  the  essential 
feebleness  and  extravagance  of  "  Jude,"  Mr.  Hardy 
introduces  certain  Phantom  Intelligences  who  act 


546  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

as  chorus.  They  comprise  the  Spirit  of  the  Tears, 
the  Spirit  of  the  Pities,  with  Spirits  Sinister  and 
Ironic.  The  reader  at  once  recognizes  in  them  old 
acquaintances,  now  for  the  first  time,  it  may  be, 
acknowledged  by  the  author  himself,  but  who  have 
long  spoken  through  him  from  their  haunts  in  Eg- 
don  Heath,  or  The  Chase,  or  the  glades  where  the 
Woodlanders  dwelt.  Yet  to  speak  of  heath  and 
glade  as  the  haunts  of  these  Spirits  is  to  understate 
the  truth.  Others  have  told  us  of  haunted  woods 
or  moors.  In  Mr.  Hardy's  work  such  features  of  the 
landscape  are  bodies,  half  for  the  hiding  and  half 
for  the  expression  and  achievement  of  these  souls. 
But  they  do  not  therefore  cease  to  be  real ;  no 
writer  of  recent  fiction  has  surpassed  Mr.  Hardy  in 
the  art  of  making  a  country-side  live  before  the 
reader's  eye,  and  its  very  weather  play  upon  his 
hearthstone. 

Perhaps  the  fact  that  the  human  experience  de- 
picted in  his  books  is  itself  so  often  little  more 
than  a  sort  of  "  cosmic  weather  "  —  either  with- 
out law  or  else  the  sport  of  some  law  the  formula 
of  whose  working  is  beyond  us  —  has  skilled  him 
in  the  transfusion  of  his  scenes  with  atmosphere. 
Spring,  for  instance,  when  it  comes  to  heath  and 
moor,  is  by  no  means  unconscious  of  its  struggle 
with  hard  natural  conditions,  and  for  some  of  us 
gains  welcome  from  the  fact.  Summer  brings  light 
and  warmth,  to  be  sure,  but  little  of  that  exuberant 
lush n ess  in  which  Richard  Feverel  met  Lucy.  It 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  547 

tends  as  often  to  express  itself  in  terms  of  the  strong, 
glowing  weather  in  which  Clym  Yeobright  cut  furze 
on  Egdon  Heath  ;  or  the  scene  grows  torrid  as  Mrs. 
Yeobright  takes  her  tragic  and  fatal  journey  across 
the  moor  to  her  son's  cottage.  Autumn  is,  however, 
Mr.  Hardy's  season.  Its  moods  are  many,  but  his 
chime  with  them  all.  The  sweet  September  weather, 
with  its  "  dry  and  rustling  undergrowths  of  spear- 
grass,"  its  general  sense  of  the  fulness  of  time, 
and  its  air  of  resignation,  brings  into  his  work  per- 
haps the  nearest  approach  to  peace  that  appears 
there.  Its  sterner  moods  are,  however,  so  germane 
to  his  purposes  that,  if  Autumn  be  his  season,  No- 
vember is  as  certainly  his  month.  It  is  in  Novem- 
ber twilight  —  one  suspects  the  Saturday  afternoon 
to  be  an  unconscious  touch  —  that  "  The  Return 
of  the  Native  "  opens,  and  the  face  of  Egdon  Heath 
reveals  itself  to  us.  Mr.  Hardy  is  chary  of  provid- 
ing his  characters  with  souls ;  but  he  is  lavish  in 
furnishing  them  to  his  high  places ;  and  the  spirit 
of  Egdon  Heath  might  fairly  be  called  his  tutelary 
genius.  Nothing  could  be  more  characteristic  than 
the  three  chapter  headings  with  which  this  novel 
opens  :  I.  "A  Face  on  which  Time  makes  but  little 
Impression  "  (the  face  of  the  Heath) ;  II.  "  Human- 
ity appears  upon  the  Scene,  Hand  in  Hand  with 
Trouble  "  ;  IE.  "  The  Custom  of  the  Country." 
These  three  things,  the  grave,  quiet  face  of  Nature, 
the  trouble,  to  which  man  is  born  as  the  sparks 
fly  upward,  and  the  established  fashion  of  a  coun- 


548  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

try-side,  its  paths,  speech,  traditions, — all  that  men 
pass  on  from  one  generation  to  another  to  distin- 
guish and  give  character  to  a  district,  — are  of  the 
essence  of  his  manner  and  matter  both.  Busy  lit- 
tle people  who  hurry  from  place  to  place  pursuing 
^ local  colour'  might  well  take  knowledge  of  him. 
The  pursuit  of  local  colour  for  its  own  sake  is  as 
futile  as  the  pursuit  of  '  culture.'  Neither  is  an  en- 
tity to  be  run  to  earth,  captured,  and  brought  home 
in  triumph.  The  so-called  ^ local  colour'  of  Mr. 
Hardy  is  that  in  which  experience  has  dyed  him 
like  his  own  reddleman  of  the  Heath. 

A  remarkable  dual  movement  has  characterized 
the  development  of  Mr.  Hardy's  art.  In  his  abil- 
ity to  construct  and  tell  a  story,  —  to  portray  the 
changeful  face  of  Nature,  and  to  reveal  in  it  the  coun- 
terpart of  man's  constant  struggle,  with  its  small 
successes  and  great  defeats,  —  he  has  shown  almost 
uninterrupted  progress ;  indeed  he  may  be  said  com- 
pletely to  have  outgrown  and  sloughed  off  the  cru- 
dities of  such  early  attempts  as  "  A  Pair  of  Blue 
Eyes,"  "  Two  on  a  Tower,"  and  "  A  Laodicean." 
On  the  other  hand,  his  art  has  deteriorated  in  so  far 
as  he  has  become  a  well-nigh  passionate  preacher 
of  pessimism.  One  can  almost  count  the  pulpit 
stairs  as  he  has  climbed  them  between  "  Far  from  the 
Madding  Crowd  "  and  ^^  Tess."  I  choose  "Tess" 
rather  than  "  Jude  "  to  mark  this  climax,  because 
"  Tess  "  is  a  great  defiant  arraignment  of  life  and 
its  contradictions,  while  "  Jude  "  is  the  utterance  of 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  549 

a  preacher  who  has  wrought  himself  so  far  beyond 
the  point  of  self-control  as  to  absolve  his  hearers 
from  seriously  weighing  what  he  says.  As  this  pro- 
gress toward  special  and  almost  impassioned  plead- 
ing has  gone  on,  two  elements  of  Mr.  Hardy's 
power  have  diminished  and  even  threatened  to  dis- 
appear. One  is  his  use  of  the  rustic  chorus ;  the 
other  is  his  humour.  In  the  earlier  Wessex  novels 
the  chorus  is  frequently  in  evidence  and  its  humour- 
ous philosophy  always  rewards  the  reader.  Life  in 
"  Far  from  the  Madding  Crowd"  had  its  tragedies, 
but  was  not  yet  altogether  tragic.  Joseph  Poorgrass, 
—  the  never-to-be-forgotten  Joseph,  who  in  the  pas- 
sion of  his  meekness  rivals  the  curate  of  Asses- 
milk-cum-Worter  in  the  "  Bab  Ballads  "  —  sums  up 
the  philosophy  of  the  book.  Its  closing  paragraph 
runs,  — 

"  Then  Oak  laughed,  and  Bathsheba  smiled  (for 
she  never  laughed  readily  now),  and  their  friends 
turned  to  go.  '  Yes,  I  suppose  that 's  the  size  o  't,' 
said  Joseph  Poorgrass,  with  a  cheerful  sigh  as  they 
moved  away  ;  '  and  I  wish  him  joy  o*  her  ;  though  I 
were  once  or  twice  upon  saying  to-day  with  holy 
Hosea,  in  my  Scripture  manner,  which  is  my  sec- 
ond nature,  "  Ephraim  is  joined  to  idols ;  let  him 
alone."  But  since  'tis  as  'tis,  why,  it  might  have 
been  worse,  and  I  feel  my  thanks  accordingly.'  " 

Joseph's  "  cheerful  sigh  "  fairly  depicts  the  tem- 
per of  Mr.  Hardy's  work  at  this  period.  Now  and 
then  the  cheer  quite  chases  the  clouds  away,  as  in 


560  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

the  series  of  early  sketches  called  "  Under  the 
Greenwood  Tree."  "  The  Return  of  the  Native," 
"  The  Mayor  of  Casterbridge,"  and  "  The  Wood- 
landers  "  mark  the  next  stage.  There  are  elements 
of  genuine  tragedy  in  them  all  —  tragedy  of  the 
classic  Greek  type  in  "  The  Mayor  of  Casterbridge," 
in  which  a  strong  man  is  overborne  by  Fate; 
though  Michael  Henchard's  strength  is  really  physi- 
cal rather  than  moral. 

"  The  Return  of  the  Native  "  and  "  The  Wood- 
landers  "  represent  perhaps  their  author's  most 
characteristic  work.  As  the  former  introduces  us 
to  the  great  presence  of  Egdon  Heath  in  Novem- 
ber, so  the  latter  opens  "  upon  the  lowering  even- 
ing of  a  by-gone  winter's  day."  The  essential 
dignity  of  such  children  of  the  soil  as  Giles  Winter- 
borne  and  Marty  South  shows  in  fine  contrast 
with  the  moral  cheapness  of  men  like  Wildeve  and 
women  like  Felice  Charmond.  Mr.  Hardy  rarely 
succeeds  in  giving  a  heroine  either  mind  or  soul 
enough  to  balance  her  big  and  passionate  body, 
unless  she  be  of  Marty  South's  humble  type.  The 
women  who  pretend  to  place  and  power  upon  his 
stage,  like  Felice,  Bathsheba  Everdene,  Eustacia 
Vye,  and  Tess,  are  cast  in  one  mould :  it  is  physi- 
cally generous,  almost  voluptuous  indeed,  and  the 
passion  which  sways  the  character  and  so  often 
rules  the  story  is  correspondingly  fleshly;  some- 
times indeed  it  is  frankly  gross.  Their  fate  is, 
to  be  sure,  foreordained  as  certainly  as  the  failure 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  651 

of  Winterborne's  party :  "  If  so  't  were  doomed  to 
be  so,"  says  old  Creedle.  But  the  depths  of  pessi- 
mism are  not  yet  sounded.  "A  soul's  specific  gravity 
is  permanently  less  than  that  of  the  sea  of  troubles 
into  which  it  is  thrown/'  comments  Mr.  Hardy,  in- 
cidentally. Hence,  since  men  in  some  degree  at 
least  control  events,  either  in  the  interest  of  confu- 
sion or  of  order,  tragedy  and  comedy  are  still  pos- 
sible ;  there  is  room  for  the  rustic  chorus,  with  its 
note  of  passing  events,  and  its  humourous  philoso- 
phy. The  "  cheerful  sigh  "  still  finds  place. 

With  the  advent  of  "  Tess  "  and  "  Jude,"  how- 
ever, Mr.  Hardy's  gloom  deepens. 

There  is  a  tide  in  the  affairs  of  men 
Which,  taken  any  way  you  please,  is  bad, 

once  sang  Mr.  Kipling;  and  it  fl^oods  these  two 
books.  To  recur  to  the  figure  of  the  preacher,  Mr. 
Hardy  is  fairly  in  the  pulpit  at  last  and  the  text  is 
from  Ecclesiastes.  The  chorus  with  its  comment 
and  implication  is  discarded.  The  preacher  speaks 
directly,  and  with  a  clearness  that  is  unmistakable. 
There  seems  at  first  to  be  a  deepening  of  the  tragic 
note;  but  maturer  thought  reveals  the  fact  that, 
while  the  superstructure  of  tragedy  is  here  in  richer 
measure  than  ever,  half  its  foundation  has  been  dug 
away.  "  It  is  then  "  (when  the  constraint  of  day 
and  the  suspense  of  night  neutralize  each  other) 
"  that  the  plight  of  being  alive  becomes  attenuated 
to  its  least  possible  dimensions."  To  such  a  pass  has 


552  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Mr.  Hardy  come.  And  later  on,  when  the  black  flag 
which  signalled  the  execution  of  Tess  for  murder 
rose  over  her  prison  tower,  he  comments,  "  'Justice' 
was  done,  and  Time,  the  Archsatirist,  had  had  his 
joke  out  with  Tess."  This  is  rather  the  tragedy  of 
a  disordered  liver  than  of  a  contradicted  and  van- 
quished life ;  for  its  mood  is  at  once  petulant  and 
dogmatic. 

It  is  here  that  a  common  issue  must  be  joined 
with  Mr.  Hardy  and  Mr.  Phillpotts.  Both  have 
great  gifts;  both  are  keenly  responsive  to  the  ap- 
peal of  earth,  sky,  and  season ;  both  are  quick  to 
discern  the  humour  of  little  incongruities  and  the 
tragedy  of  great  contradictions ;  both  appreciate 
the  place  and  play  of  sexual  instinct,  sometimes  as 
mere  fleshly  passion  and  again  sublimated  into  a 
love  stronger  than  death,  in  human  affairs ;  both 
find  almost  too  frank  a  delight  in  dwelling  upon 
its  less  seemly  accessories  and  incidents ;  both  have 
shown  a  notable  command  of  simple  pathos  in  such 
characters  as  Mr.  Hardy's  Marty  South  and  Mr. 
Phillpotts's  Nicholas  Edgecombe;  both  have  de- 
picted tragedy  of  the  most  genuine  sort ;  and  each 
has  upon  occasion  set  an  obstacle  in  the  path  to 
his  own  greatest  achievement  by  assuming  the  dress 
and  manner  of  a  high-priest  of  Fate.  This  special 
pleading  in  Fate's  behalf  is  strewn  plenteously 
through  "Tess"  and  "  Jude."  It  will  be  enough 
for  readers  of  Mr.  Phillpotts  to  turn  back  to 
"The  Secret  Woman"  and  its  chapter  on  "The 


THE   NEWER  FICTION  553 

Talking  Men."  But  the  surplusage  of  theology  is 
after  all  a  minor  blemish ;  the  larger  harm  befalls 
when  they  introduce  a  malevolent  Chance  into  the 
place  of  rule  in  their  stories  and  by  so  much  sap 
the  personality  of  their  characters.  To  rob  a  man 
of  character,  by  which  I  mean  will,  vital  personal 
force,  and  the  moral  power  to  dominate  events,  — 
all,  in  short,  that  is  understood  by  the  Image  of 
God  in  him,  —  and  thereby  to  further  the  dominion 
of  a  malignant  demon,  is  not  the  path  to  tragedy's 
greater  heights.  Yet  it  is  a  divinity  of  this  type  who 
shapes  the  ends  of  Jude.  Tess  seems  a  better  de- 
veloped character  physically  and  morally,  and  worth 
Fate's  hunting.  The  episode  of  her  undoing  in  the 
Chase,  although  somewhat  too  largely  dwelt  upon, 
is  honest  tragedy;  but  when  it  comes  to  the  long 
chapter  of  malevolent  events  which  divorced  her 
from  the  man  she  loved  and  gave  her  over  again 
to  the  man  she  finally  murdered,  the  note  under 
Clare's  door  which  he  must  needs  miss,  and  the 
letter  to  Brazil  which  must  needs  miscarry,  the  dia- 
holus  ex  machina  becomes  an  obsession. 

Mr.  Phillpotts  admirably  illustrates  the  same  ten- 
dency in  "The  Secret  Woman,"  a  book  which,  in 
spite  of  grave  faults,  develops  a  high  degree  of 
tragic  power;  but  it  is  tragedy  which  is  robbed  of 
half  its  rights  by  the  sheer  malice  of  Chance.  "  The 
Wind  Bloweth  where  it  Listeth "  is  the  title  of  a 
chapter  in  which  a  gust  of  wind  shaking  a  case- 
ment, and  a  dash  of  rain  upon  its  panes,  drown  a 


554  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

wronged  wife's  offer  of  forgiveness  to  her  erring 
husband.  He  did  not  hear ;  she  supposed  him  to  have 
heard  without  any  reply,  and  the  iron  fastened 
itself  deeper  in  her  soul.  A  little  later,  while  the 
storm  still  raged,  —  a  magnificent  storm,  for  which 
all  readers  who  love  weather  for  its  own  sake  must 
bless  Mr.  Phillpotts,  —  she,  so  crazed  with  grief  and 
anger  as  to  be  deaf  in  turn  to  his  penitent  words, 
found  him  at  the  curb  of  the  deep  farm-well.  Tears 
of  sorrow  stood  in  his  eyes,  but  these  she  could  not 
see;  she  only  heard  him  whistling,  as  was  his  wont 
in  times  of  agitation.  She  struck  him  across  the 
neck,  in  anger  certainly,  but  with  no  thought  of 
what  was  to  ensue;  when  he  lost  his  balance  and 
plunged  to  his  death  below.  No  paraphrase  can  do 
justice  to  Mr.  Phillpotts's  narrative ;  but  not  even 
his  ability  as  a  narrator  can  hide  the  assumption 
of  a  malevolent  demon  working  his  will  upon  these 
puppets  under  cover  of  the  storm.  It  is  no  mere 
happening :  the  wind  really  bloweth  not  where  it 
listeth,  but  where  this  evil  genius  compels.  Hence 
the  tragic  force  of  the  story  at  this  point  is  seri- 
ously weakened ;  but  swells  again,  not  only  to  re- 
ality, but  to  a  high  degree  of  power,  as  the  course 
of  Ann  Redvers's  later  life  develops  through  re- 
morse and  pain  to  a  penitence  which  leads  her  not 
only  to  give  herself  up  to  punishment,  but  to  labour 
after  her  imprisonment  is  over,  for  the  spiritual 
recovery  of  her  husband's  paramour,  Salome  West- 
away.  The  latter  speaks :  — 


THE   NEWER  FICTION  655 

"  ^  There  are  things  too  small  for  God  to  heed, 
Ann.  My  broken  life  is  one  of  them/ 

"^ Never  —  never!  All  —  to  the  pattern  of  the 
frost  on  these  dear  graves  —  be  the  thought-out  in- 
vention of  our  God.  Nought 's  too  small  for  Him, 
Salome  ;  an'  nought 's  too  great.  If  He  's  suffered 
even  me  —  if  He  's  let  the  candle  of  hope  flicker 
even  yet  in  my  evil  heart  —  how  much  more  you  ! 
Be  your  sad  soul  a  small  thing  to  Him  ?  .  .  .  Be- 
lieve there 's  no  darkness  on  earth  that  God  an'  man 
working  together  can't  turn  into  light.  I  've  lamed 
that ;  an'  I  've  lamed  what  God's  forgiveness  means. 
Ours  be  but  the  shadow  of  His.  He  comes  three 
parts  of  the  way.  The  haste  of  God,  Salome ! 
Quicker  'n  the  lightning.  A  sigh  of  sorrow  brings 
Him,  or  one  humble  thought.'  " 

Now  it  chances  that  Mr.  Phillpotts  is  —  or  re- 
cently was  —  an  active  member  of  an  aggressive 
Rationalist  Society ;  and  in  justice  to  himself,  must 
be  regarded  as  speaking  solely  in  character  here. 
The  fact  which  I  wish  to  point  out  is,  that  for  his 
really  victorious  characters,  —  for  those,  that  is, 
who  seem  adequate  to  circumstance, — he  still  has 
recourse  to  men  and  women  of  faith.  Their  rela- 
tive orthodoxy  or  heterodoxy  matters  little  enough. 
Uncle  Chirgwin  in  "Lying  Prophets,"  Nicholas 
Edgecombe  in  "  The  River,"  Ann  Redvers  in  "  The 
Secret  Woman,"  and  Humphrey  Baskerville  in 
"  The  Three  Brothers,"  are  all  characters  instead  of 
marionettes.  In  fiction  as  in  life  some  faith  or  other 
seems  needful  to  ultimate  conquest  of  circumstance. 


556  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

It  is  also  eminently  needful  to  humour,  for  rea- 
sons that  have  been  repeatedly  indicated  in  the 
foregoing  chapters ;  since  the  essence  of  humour 
is  a  fairly  confident  attitude  toward  the  confusion 
of  events.  These  cross-currents  of  experience  may 
simply  amuse,  they  may  absorb  the  serious  atten- 
tion, or  they  may  threaten  utter  loss.  The  man 
who  can  maintain  his  integrity  in  face  of  their 
wrath  because  of  his  faith  in  a  Power  with  whose 
plan  of  beneficence  his  life  is  mysteriously  bound 
up,  is  also  the  man  who  can  best  afford  to  smile 
at  their  play.  Take  away  this  man's  faith  in  God 
and  his  own  soul,  supply  its  place  with  a  theory  of 
the  malignant  lordship  of  Chance,  and  his  laughter 
must  lose  its  heartiness,  while  his  smile  fades  into 
wistfulness  or  scorn. 

Not  too  much  should  be  made  of  the  fact  that 
the  admirable  choruses  of  Mr.  Hardy  and  Mr. 
Phillpotts  are  generally  composed  of  simple-hearted 
and  believing  men.  This  is  of  course  a  necessity. 
But  it  is  worth  while  to  note  that  the  rustic  phi- 
losophy which  seasons  these  novels  like  salt  is  largely 
a  product  of  religious  teaching  and  finds  its  best 
expression  in  Scripture  language.  From  Mr.  Hardy's 
Joseph  Poorgrass,  "sorrowing  like  a  man  in  trav- 
ail," to  Mr.  Phillpotts 's  Thomas  GoUop,  specu- 
lating upon  his  reception  at  the  Judgement  Seat 
should  he  cut  his  throat  and  appear  untimely  like 
one  who  might  go  to  a  party  "  afore  you  'm  in- 
vited, — a  very  presumpshuss  and  pushing  thing  to 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  557 

be  sure,"  these  men  not  only  fall  back  naturally 
upon  the  words  and  thoughts  of  religion  to  express 
their  views  of  life,  but  their  humour  gains  a  sort 
of  wholesome  force  from  the  contact.  They  practi- 
cally disappear  from  the  precincts  of  ^^Jude"  and 
^'  Tess,"  whose  bitterness  must  be  their  poison ; 
but  in  "  The  Dynasts  "  the  reader  is  permitted  to 
welcome  them  again.  Here,  in  his  latest  and  in  some 
respects  his  noblest  work,  Mr.  Hardy  arrays  a  great 
stage  and  summons  great  figures  to  play  upon 
it.  It  seems  to  have  occurred  to  him  that  if  there 
be  justification  for  the  malignant  demons  who 
haunt  his  later  novels,  an  equal  right  exists  for 
the  occasional  introduction  of  beneficent  powers ; 
indeed,  toward  the  close  one  half  suspects  him  of 
making  room  for  God.  He  dare  not  go  further  than 
the  neuter  pronoun  *It'  in  his  references  to  this 
mysterious  Power;  but  he  has  succeeded  in  creat- 
ing men  and  women  with  enough  semblance  of 
the  divine  image  to  compel  events.  Oddly  enough, 
he  calls  them  puppets  here,  and  reveals  the  demon 
at  whose  behests  they  move.  In  "  Jude  "  he  called 
them  men  and  women  and  the  malignant  presences 
were  hidden.  Yet  in  "The  Dynasts"  his  puppets 
prove  to  be  men,  as  in  "Jude"  his  men  shrink  to 
forlorn  dolls:  perhaps  because  in  "The  Dynasts  ' 
he  is  portraying  a  veritable  world-drama ;  perhaps, 
too,  because  upon  and  behind  the  curtain  of  events 
there  moves  an  Immanent  Will  that  is  already  jus- 
tifying the  presage  of  Mr.  Hardy's  final  Chorus. 


558  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

But  —  a  stirring  thrills  the  air 
Like  to  sounds  of  joyance  there 
That  the  rages 
Of  the  ages 
Shall  he  cancelled,  and  deliverance  offered  from  the  darts  that 

were, 
Consciousness  the  "Will  informing,  till  It  fashion  all  things  fair  ! 

We  have  at  last  arrived  at  the  end  of  a  way  some- 
what longer  than  I  expected  upon  setting  out.  In 
the  journey  my  endeavour  has  been,  not  so  much  to 
prove  a  thesis  as  to  point  out  certain  things  by  the 
wayside  which  seem  to  have  significance  and  to  be- 
long together.  We  have  seen,  for  instance,  that  a 
time  of  religious  revival  is  generally  followed  by  a 
period  of  literary  activity ;  and  that  great  literature 
relates  itself  by  a  sort  of  instinct  to  the  themes  of  re- 
ligion, though  the  relation  may  be  byway  of  protest 
or  revolt  instead  of  acceptance.  Furthermore,  this 
interest  in  religion  has  shown  a  singular  vitality, 
despite  all  attempts  to  eradicate  it  by  violence,  to 
starve  it  by  neglect,  to  belittle  it  with  contempt,  or 
to  weaken  it  by  patronage.  James  Mill,  for  instance, 
was  as  successful  as  any  man  could  hope  to  be  in 
treating  religion  as  though  it  were  a  nonentity  in 
the  rearing  of  his  famous  son ;  but  he  could  not 
preclude  John  Mill  from  finally  developing  an  in- 
tense interest  in  religious  problems,  or  from  writing 
essays  in  theology,  which  are  among  the  most 
memorable  of  his  works.  It  has  appeared,  moreover, 
that  whenever  new  scientific  theories  upon  questions 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  559 

of  human  origin  or  destiny  were  developed,  it  has 
been  impossible  to  prevent  a  canvassing  of  their 
religious  significance.  The  literature  of  these  sub- 
jects, as  distinguished  from  mere  technical  treatises 
or  essays  upon  them,  has  often  been  distinctly  theo- 
logical, —  some  of  Huxley's  "  Lay  Sermons,"  and 
Romanes's  "  Candid  Examination  "  may  serve  as 
illustrations,  — and  has  owed  its  appeal  to  the  gen- 
eral public  in  no  small  degree  to  this  fact. 

The  stress  of  such  a  period  of  doubt  and  read- 
justment has  also  coloured  much  of  the  century's 
later  poetry  and  fiction.  The  ever-present  'social 
problem'  can  never  be  discussed  for  very  long,  either 
in  essay  or  novel,  without  implicating  religion,  and 
no  candid  reader  will  deny  the  religious  element  in 
works  as  different  as  Ebenezer  Elliott's  poems  and 
Georo:e  Gissino^'s  "  The  Nether  World."  I  have  not 
hesitated  to  accord  a  wide  range  to  religion  here; 
but  it  is  no  wider  than  the  explicit  definition  of  the 
prophet,  "to  do  justly,  to  love  mercy,  and  to  walk 
humbly  with  thy  God";  or  than  the  two  inclusive 
Commandments  of  Christ.  To  have  limited  the  scope 
of  religion  to  the  accepted  sway  of  any  dogmatic 
system  would  have  been  to  belittle  our  discussion 
beyond  reason,  since  it  has  ever  been  a  prerogative 
of  religion,  as  cheering  to  her  disciples  as  it  is  vex- 
ing to  her  foes,  willingly  to  leave  the  forms  of  one 
generation  as  soon  as  they  have  hardened,  for  some 
more  vital  if  not  more  stately  mansion  in  the  next. 

I  have  further  thought  it  right  and  germane  to 


560  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

my  theme  to  point  out  the  significant  number  of 
men  of  letters  who  have  been  bred  in  the  homes  of 
ministers  of  religion,  or  who  have  received  at  least 
a  part  of  their  training  in  preparation  for  the  min- 
istry. When  the  fact  is  noted  that  in  the  latter  class 
are  met  such  diverse  types  as  George  Crabbe,  Cole- 
ridge, James  Mill,  Carlyle,  and  Kingsley,  some  of 
my  readers  may  be  moved  to  question  whether  this 
influence  of  religion  upon  letters  has  been  for  better 
or  for  worse,  and  I  have  declined  to  dogmatize ;  al- 
though my  own  conviction  is  that  here  the  debt  of 
literature  to  religion  is  both  real  and  great. 

No  such  doubt  will  arise,  however,  with  reference 
to  the  part  which  the  language  of  religion  has  played 
in  the  making  of  literature.  The  taste  of  the  indi- 
vidual author  in  his  use  of  religious  phrase  or  ref- 
erence may  be  questioned,^  but  the  adaptation  of 
religious  language  to  the  purposes  of  poet,  essayist, 
historian,  and  novelist,  when  these  are  at  their  best, 
is  not  to  be  gainsaid.  No  other  field  has  proved  so 
fertile  in  literary  allusions  of  universal  import  as  the 
Old  and  New  Testaments. 

The  debt  has  been  mutual ;  and  while  literature 
has  gained  in  depth,  range,  and  power  of  utterance 
from  religion,  religion  has  as  truly  profited  in  hu- 
manity, balance,  and  ability  to  accord  its  message  to 
the  needs  of  men  from  the  influence  of  letters.  The 
popular  study  of  the  Bible  as  literature  is  a  product 

^  As  for  instance  Thackeray's  use  of  Psalm  CXXVI  in  Henry 
Esmond.     Cf.  anie^  chap.  ix. 


THE  NEWER  FICTION  661 

of  the  century  which  we  have  traversed ;  in  certain 
directions  the  result  has  seemed  revolutionary,  and 
has  been  attended  by  the  disorder  and  loss  always 
incident  to  revolution  ;  but  faithful  men  are  con- 
fident of  ultimate  gain,  and  much  of  this  gain  along 
the  lines  indicated  has  already  been  realized. 

Great  literature  can  spring  only  from  the  deeper 
experiences  of  life.  It  can  gain  imperishable  form 
only  through  high  and  sustained  flights  of  the 
trained  imagination.  Religion  searches  the  depths 
of  man's  heart;  while  at  the  same  time  it  has  been 
a  chief  inspirer  of  his  imagination,  holding  visions 
before  his  eyes  and  fixing  his  thoughts  upon  themes 
of  origin  and  destiny.  It  has  led  him  moreover  to 
think  of  these  things,  not  as  mere  idle  dreams  or 
curious  problems,  but  as  personal  concerns  of  vital 
moment.  The  influence  of  religion  upon  literature 
has  been  great,  because  the  experience  of  religion 
has  upon  the  whole  been  real. 


INDEX 


*'A.  L.  0.  E.,"504. 

Abraham,  17. 

Accomplishment,  emphasis  put 
upon,  in  the  19th  century,  31. 

Adams,  Prof.  G.  B.,  his  address 
History  and  the  Philosophy  of 
History,  495. 

*  Adaptation  to  environment,'  134. 

Adonais,  Shelley's,  quoted,  126. 

Aeschylus,  animated  by  religious 
idea  of  tragedy,  22. 

Agassiz,  L.  J.  R.,  414. 

Agnosticism,  and  agnostics,  412-415, 
442  ;  novels  of,  517-524. 

Alastor,  Shelley's,  preface  to,  quot- 
ed, 118. 

Alton  Locke,  Kingsley,  297. 

Ancient  Mariner,  The,  CoUridge's, 
a  work  of  genius,  84. 

Anti-slavery  agitation,  175. 

Aphorisms,  the  making  of,  534, 
535. 

Apologia,  Newman,  196. 

Archer,  William,  cited,  460,  489  n., 
491  n. 

Ariel  and  Caliban,  Coleridge's  crit- 
icism upon  the  characters  of,  107. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  on  Wordsworth, 
61,  72;  on  Coleridge,  77;  his 
criticism  of  Byron,  106;  under 
forty  when  he  wrote  of  doubt 
and  disillusion,  424;  religion  a 
chief  source  of  his  inspiration, 
431 ;  compared  with  Clough,  431, 
432;  compared  with  his  father, 
432,  433 ;  note  of  blithesomeness, 
almost  wholly  lacking  in  his  po- 
etry, 433 ;  his  use  of  themes  and 
language  of  religion,  434 ;  what 
his  poems  represent,  435 ;  reli- 
gion in  his  writings,  437 ;  has 
French  felicities  of  style,  438 ; 
master  phrase -maker,  439;  his 
mind  saturated  with  Biblical  and 
devotional    thought,   439;    com- 


pared with  Froude,  440,  441 ;  in- 
consistency in,  442. 

Arnold,  Thomas,  432,  436. 

'Art  for  art's  sake,'  111. 

Ashford,  Isaac,  in  Crabbe's  The 
Parish  Register,  53,  54. 

Ashley,  Lord,  330. 

Austen,  Jane,  and  Maria  Edge- 
worth,  242,  243 ;  her  gallery  of 
miniatures,  245  ;  her  characters 
instinct  with  a  real  life,  246 ;  tol- 
erant of  her  characters,  246, 247 ; 
the  characteristics  of  her  work 
those  which  religion  tends  to  fos- 
ter, 248 ;  her  influence  on  Scott, 
248,  249. 

Autobiography  of  Mark  Butherford, 
The,  522,523. 

Aylmer^s  Field,  Tennyson,  quoted, 
367. 

Baden  Powell.   See  Powell,  Baden. 

Bagehot,  Walter,  on  the  First  Ed- 
inburgh Reviewers,  127 ;  his  es- 
timate of  the  Whig  ideal,  139; 
on  the  Whig  aversion  to  mysti- 
cism, 144,  145 ;  on  Jeffrey's  criti- 
cism of  Wordsworth,  145  ;  para- 
phrased,   157 ;   on  sacred  poets, 

-  192;  on  Scott,  253,  257;  on 
Tennyson's  Enoch  Arden,  384  n. 

Bailey,  P.  J.,  "  Festus,"  425,  426. 

Barbauld,  Mrs.,  Diary,  quoted,  31. 

Bar6re,  Macaulay  on,  182. 

Barrie,  J.  M.,  504. 

Beagle,  the,  403. 

Benn,  A.  W.,  his  History  of  English 
Rationalism  in  the  Nineteenth  Cen- 
tury, 185  n. ;  cited,  312  n.,  315  n., 
316  ,  318,  323  ;  his  insinuations 
against  men  of  science,  412  n. 

Bentham,  Jeremy,  312,  318. 

Bible,  its  influence  upon  the  na- 
tional language  and  literature, 
16,   364,   365 ;    its  influence    on 


564 


INDEX 


Browning  and  Tennyson,  364-369, 
382  ;  quoted,  478.    See  Scripture. 

Biglow  Papers^  Lowell,  346,  347. 

Biology,  410. 

Birrell,  Rt.  Hon.  A.,  Obiter  Dicta 
cited,  155  ;  on  Newman,  196. 

Blackwood'' s,  on  the  Conservative 
side,  129,  131 ;  writers  for,  130 ; 
early  volumes  of,  moderate  tone 
in,  132,  133;  blazed  the  way  for  a 
fair  reception  for  believers  and 
skeptics,  148-150. 

Blake,  William,  mystical  element 
in,  58  ;  perhaps  not  wholly  sane, 
58 ;  his  Reeds  of  Innocence,  59 ; 
The  Tyger,  59  ;  James  Thomson's 
poem  on,  59,  60. 

Blunt,  W.  S.,  488. 

Book  of  Common  Prayer,  16. 

Bronte,  Charlotte  and  Emily,  267, 
268,  270,  271. 

Brooke,  Stopford  A.,  Poetry  of 
Tennyson  cited,  384  n. ;  cited, 
392  n. 

Brown,  T.  E.,  his  strictures  on 
Cowper,  48  n. ;  his  My  Garden, 
492. 

Browning,  Robert,  quotation  from, 
on  death,  349 ;  compared  and 
contrasted  with  Tennyson,  351- 
356,  360,  361,  365-369,  376,  386, 
387;  did  not  treat  the  English 
language  with  a  decent  respect, 
353,  354 ;  his  perverse  cacopho- 
nies, 355,  356 ;  treasures  some- 
times appear  in  his  worst  verse, 
356,  357 ;  has  suffered  and  de- 
served much  at  the  hands  of  com- 
mentators, 357 ;  his  alleged  ob- 
scurity, 357;  his  Sordello  trans- 
lated into  English  by  David 
Duff,  357;  Sordello  could  not 
have  been  made  an  '  easy  '  poem, 
358;  the  key  to  his  work,  359; 
essentially  religious,  360 ;  repre- 
sents the  non-conforming  ele- 
ment in  English  life  and  verse, 
361;  cosmopolitan,  361,  362;  his 
non-conforming  manner  of  ap- 
proaching a  subject,  363  ;  his  con- 
nection with  religion,  363,  364; 
his  relation  to  the  Bible,  364- 
369;  prefigures  something  of 
Pragmatism,  376 ;  his  pathos,  388, 


389 ;  religious  poems,  389,  390 ; 
Pippa  Passes,  390,  391 ;  his  me- 
thod in  using  religious  and  ethi- 
cal material,  391,  392  ;  reason  for 
early  neglect  and  later  vogue, 
392  ;  secret  of  his  influence,  393. 

Bryant,  W.  C,  heir  to  the  Puritan 
heritage,  341,342;  moved  in  the 
realm  of  the  concrete,  344,  345. 

Buchanan.  Robert,  488, 

Bulwer-Lytton,  Sir  Edward,  294, 
295. 

Bunyan,  John,  compared  with 
Clough,  427,  428;  cited,  517;  a 
living  allegory,  500,  501, 

Burke,  Edmund,  comforted  by 
Wilberforce's  Practical  View, 
etc.,  172 ;  on  Wilberforce,  173. 

Burns,  Robert,  on  Cowper's  The 
Task,  44,  45 ;  inspired  to  sing 
and  fly,  55 ;  revealed  himself  un- 
reservedly in  his  verse,  55  ;  was 
weak,  55  ;  The  Cottar^s  Saturday 
Night  his  best  poem,  55,  56 ;  re- 
ligious feeling  in,  55-57 ;  Long- 
fellow's verses  on,  .56,  57. 

Bushnell,  Horace,  337^339. 

Butler,  Samuel,  Hudibras,  a  bur- 
lesque, 500,  501.  ^ 

Byron,  Lord,  combined  something 
of  Mirabeau,  Danton,  and  Napo- 
leon in  himself,  92,  93;  his  career 
not  to  be  understood  apart  from 
the  public  of  the  day,  94,  95  ;  pe- 
culiarities of,  95 ;  a  poseur,  96 ; 
impertinent  in  English  Bards  and 
Scotch  Reviewers,  97  ;  the  centre 
of  all  is  himself,  97  ;  his  cynicism 
becomes  him  and  is  essential  to 
him,  98 ;  felt  the  freedom  of  the 
open  sea,  99 ;  his  tragedy  spoiled 
by  his  element  of  misanthropy, 
100 ;  his  shipwreck  scenes,  100- 
102;  his  inventiveness  and  ingenu- 
ity, 103  ;  tributes  of  Goethe,  Maz- 
zini,  and  Castelar  to,  103  n. ;  the 
author's  feelings    on    re-reading, 

103,  104  ;  use  of  the  sneer  and 
the   mocking  question   in    Cain, 

104,  105 ;  an  apostle  of  revolu- 
tion, 105,  106  ;  contrasted  with 
Shelley,  107,  108 ;  the  secret  of  his 
perversity,  108 ;  Britain  neces- 
sary to  him,  362. 


INDEX 


565 


Caine,  Hall,  515. 

Caliban  and  Ariel,  Coleridge's  crit- 
icism upon  the  characters  of, 
107. 

Calvinism,  and  Cowper,  40,  41  ;  of 
the  Evangelicals,  185  ;  a  trans- 
lation of  Stoicism  into  terms  of 
Christianity,  187  ;  had  been  es- 
sentially rationalistic,  343  ;  dealt 
with  the  race,  343  ;  and  George 
Macdonald,  515-517. 

Camera,  may  prove  untruthful,  498. 

Campbell,  J.  Dykes,  on  Coleridge, 
80. 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  his  remark  upon 
Byron's  death,  106 ;  and  Job, 
199;  on  his  father,  200;  Swin- 
burne on,  200 ;  was  selfish,  201 ; 
on  Keats,  201 ;  self -conceited, 
202  ;  had  little  sense  of  gratitude, 
202,  203;  laborious,  203;  affec- 
tionate, 203 ;  his  honesty  and 
courage,  203,  204;  hopeless  to 
try  to  sum  him  up,  205 ;  impos- 
sible to  articulate  his  faith  into  a 
system  or  to  appraise  his  religious 
influence,  206;  intensely  relig- 
ious, 206  ;  stood  in  the  succession 
of  the  Hebrew  prophets,  207 ; 
his  vision  partial,  207,  208,  211, 
212 ;  his  few  great  principles, 
208,  209;  his  teaching  contrast- 
ed with  that  of  Scripture,  212 ; 
reason  for  his  biography,  213, 
214  ;  drew  upon  recognized  forms 
of  religious  experience  and  ex- 
pression in  the  voicing  of  his  mes- 
sage, 214 ;  his  message  summa- 
rized, 215-217  ;  inspired  and  in- 
fluenced others,  217,  218 ;  Tish- 
bite  elements  in,  219;  religion 
entered  into  the  substance  of  his 
pre-natal  life,  221 ;  much  of  his 
influence  due  to  his  evangelical 
training,  223  ;  and  Ruskin,  simi- 
larity of  their  bringing  up  and 
belief,  224,  225 ;  and  Mazzini,.332, 
333;  and  Tennyson,  Tyndall's 
comparison  of,  375. 

Castelar,  Emilio,  on  his  tribute  to 
Byron,  103  n. 

Cenci,  The.  Shelley's,  quoted,  117. 

Chaldee  Manuscript^  a  clever  bit  of 
irreverence,  148,  149. 


Chalmers,  Thomas,  on  Carlyle,  213. 

Chambers,  Robert,  his  Vestigts  of 
Creation,  405. 

Chaucer,  relioious  setting  of  his 
Canterbury  Tales,  500. 

Chesterton,  G.  K.,  an  entertaining 
companion,  but  an  uncertain 
guide,  274  n. ;  on  Dickens  and 
Gissing,  278. 

Childhood,  the  period  of  greatest 
fears  and  burdens,  423,  4^. 

Christian  Socialism,  337. 

Christian  Year,  192,  193,  194. 

Christianity,  capable  of  develop- 
ment, 317  ;  the  dogmatism  of,  ac- 
countable in  great  measure  for 
religious  controversy,  339;  the 
Unitarians  and  the  orthodox,  339, 
340 ;  missionary  activity,  340, 341; 
the  burden  of,  373 ;  its  essence,  to 
interpret  life's  discords  in  terms 
of  possible  harmony,  465. 

Church,  the  nursing  mother  of  lit- 
erature, 25. 

Church  of  England,  and  Methodism, 
163  ;  strain  of,  runs  through  Ten- 
nyson's life  and  work,  360 ;  liberal 
movement  within,  3:34. 

Church  History,  Milner,  176. 

Church  Missionary  Society,  175. 

Circumstance,  man's  mastery  of,  11, 
13,  19. 

City  of  Dreadful  Night,  The,  Thom- 
son, 474-478. 

Clapham,  tradition  or  influence,  in 
Macaulay  family,  181-184;  in 
Stephen  family,  184-187. 

Clapham  sect,  the,  27;  use  of  the 
term,  168. 

Clapham  Evangelicals,  their  influ- 
ence on  literature,  175. 

Clarke,  J.  F.,  cited,  344  n. 

Clarkson,  Thomas,  168. 

Clergy,  the  training  of  their  homes, 
of  a  sort  to  foster  literature,  25-27. 

Claudian,  Coleridere  on,  83. 

Clifford,  W.  K.,  413. 

Clough,  A.  H.,  under  forty  when  he 
wrote  of  doubt  and  disillusion, 
424;  embodies  higher  traits  of 
English  character,  426;  com- 
pared with  Bunyan,  427,  428; 
lent  his  conscience  to  excess  of 
doubt,  428 ;  had  a  trust  in  the 


566 


INDEX 


veracity  and  sanity  of  man's  ex- 
perience, 429 ;  on  doubt  and  faith, 
429,  430 ;  religion  a  chief  source 
of  his  inspiration,  431 ;  compared 
■with  Matthew  Arnold,  431,  432. 

Cobbe,  Frances  Power,  413. 

Cobbett,  William,  328,  329. 

Cobden,  Richard,  331. 

'  Cockney  School,'  130,  131. 

Coleridge,  S.  T.,  the  contrasts  in,  77, 
78  ;  his  talk,  78 ;  one  of  the  great 
intellectual  and  spiritual  forces 
of  his  century,  79,  80 ;  his  influ- 
ence in  the  field  of  poetry,  80 ; 
still  lives  in  works  in  criticism, 
philosophy,  and  religion,  81;  his 
religious  doctrine,  81 ;  saw  the 
significance  of  German  learning 
for  English  thought,  81,  82;  his 
imagination  and  sympathies 
catholic,  82;  had  genius  for  in- 
sight, 83 ;  felt  the  connection  of 
religion  and  literature,  83 ;  on 
Claudian,  83;  distinguishes  be- 
tween poetry  and  prose,  83 ;  The 
Ancient  Mariner,  84 ;  reintroduced 
atmosphere  of  wonder  and  mys- 
tery into  English  verse,  84,  85 ; 
his  prose  easy  to  comprehend,  85, 
86 ;  on  Wordsworth,  86 ;  his  two 
principles  of  criticism  of  Scrip- 
ture, 87 ;  had  a  keen  sense  for  the 
organic,  87 ;  his  attitude  toward 
the  Bible,  87-89;  believed  that 
investigation  would  strengthen 
religious  faith,  90;  kept  his 
hands  with  neatness,  95  ;  his  crit- 
icism upon  the  characters  of  Cali- 
ban and  Ariel,  107. 

Comedy  and  tragedy,  the  great  poet 
sees  both,  106. 

Comparison,  demon  of,  in  criticism, 
272 ;  impossible  where  definition 
is  impossible,  273. 

Conservatism,  represented  by  the 
Quarterly,  130 ;  by  Blackwood'' s, 
131 ;  true,  consists  in  fostering  vi- 
tality, 136. 

Conservatives,  Liberals  of  early  nine- 
teenth century  the  true,  134  ;  ul- 
tra, their  weakness  lies  in  cyni- 
cism and  selfishness,  137. 

Contrast,  tendency  of  critics  to  in- 
dulge in,  350,  351. 


Conway,    Moncnre,   on    Browning, 

364  n. 

Cooper,  J.  F.,  258-260. 

Cooper,  Thomas,  329,  330. 

Corelli,  Marie,  514. 

Cosmos,  religion  based  upon  faith 
in,  9. 

Cowper,  William,  his  life,  in  out- 
ward seeming,  monotonous,  but, 
in  reality,  adventurous,  34-36 ; 
his  madness  in  the  first  place  not 
related  to  religion,  36 ;  his  letters, 
37 ;  why  he  took  to  verse,  37,  38 ; 
The  Task,  38,  39 ;  quotation  on, 
39 ;  his  theological  obsession,  40, 
41  ;  religion  his  blessing,  42  ;  his 
Lines  to  my  Mother^ s  Picture,  42 ; 
his  hymns,  42,  43  ;  his  Voltaire 
and  the  Lace-  Worker,  43 ;  his 
Hope,  43,  44 ;  the  religious  ele- 
ment in  his  work,  44-46 ;  the  poet 
of  the  English  Evangelicals,  45, 
49 ;  source  of  his  sense  of  humour, 
46--48;  dignified  little  matters, 
48;  lines  on  Anson's  sailor,  49, 
50. 

Crabbe,  George,  keen  of  observa- 
tion, 50 ;  life's  highways  fur- 
nished him  with  tragedy  and  com- 
edy, 51 ;  knew  the  lot  of  the  poor 
at  first  hand,  51-53  ;  his  poetry 
religious,  53;  The  Parish  Register^ 
53,  54 ;  a  realist,  54 ;  grew  grey 
in  his  old  age,  95,  96. 

Craik,  Mrs.,  504. 

Crauford,  A.  H.,  494. 

Criminal  code,  mitigation  of  the 
severity  of,  176. 

Criticism,  new,  of  early  part  of  nine- 
teenth century,  129;  spirit  of 
comparison  in,  272,  273,  350. 

Cronwright,  Mrs.  See  Schreiner, 
Olive. 

Cross,  W.  L.,  on  Thackeray,  292. 

Dante,  22, 

Danton,  stands  for  the  revolutionary 
impulse  upon  its  destructive  side, 
91,  92. 

Darwin,  Charles,  letter  to  Romanes 
quoted,  402 ;  his  early  life,  403  ; 
his  'epoch-making  book,'  404; 
idea  of  derived  species  not  origi- 
nal with,  405 ;  the  magnitude  of 


INDEX 


667 


the  results  of  his  work,  405,  406 ; 
his  self -depreciation,  407  ;  his  dis- 
like of  religious  discussion,  408, 
409 ;  his  theory  involved  a  reli- 
gious question,  409,  410 ;  his  in- 
vestigation, as  touching  man, 
found  publicity  and  criticism, 
411-413;  hesitation  of  men  in 
presence  of  his  conclusions,  414- 
416;  his  doctrine  not  identical  with 
materialism,  416,  417. 

Darwin,  Erasmus,  403. 

David,  18. 

Davidson,  John,  his  Ballad  in  Blank 
Verse,  479-^1 ;  his  A  Northern 
Suburb,  481 ;  his  Thirty  Bob  a 
Week,  483,  484. 

Death,  Browning  on,  349. 

Deland,  Margaret,  507. 

De  Morgan,  William,  509. 

De  Quincey,  Thomas,  set  himself 
definitely  to  the  defence  of  current  { 
Christianity,  156 ;  his  eminence 
and  claim  upon  our  memories  due 
to  his  mastery  of  rhetoric,  157  ; 
has  recourse  to  the  Bible  for  the 
language  of  his  most  splendid  pe- 
riods, 158  ;  witnesses  to  the  inter- 
dependence of  literature  and  re- 
ligion, 160. 

De  Selincourt,  Basil,  cited,  468. 

De  Tabley,  Lord,  488. 

Deuteronomy  quoted,  6. 

Dickens,  Charles,  and  Leigh  Hunt, 
153 ;  called  an  idealist,  but  quite 
as  much  a  realist,  274,  275 ;  the 
appeal  of  religion  to,  276  ;  minis- 
ters of  religion  in  his  works,  276 ; 
unsympathetic  toward  asceticism, 
277 ;  eminently  humane,  277 ; 
attitude  toward  poverty,  277, 278 ; 
his  childlikeness,  278  ;  his  appeal 
to  childhood,  279-281 ;  his  power 
of  seizing  upon  salient  features, 
281 ;  his  lack  of  restraint  in  pa- 
thos, 281,  282  ;  his  essential  clean- 
ness, 282,  283  ;  his  reforming  pur- 
pose, 283-285 ;  gives  added  illus- 
tration to  the  fundamentals  of 
Christ's  Gospel,  285,  286;  the 
character  of  Dora  in  Copperjield, 
388. 

Dobson,  Austin,  487. 

Domett,  Alfred,  quoted,  389. 


Don  Juaitf  Byron's,  shipwreck  In, 

100. 
Doubters,  423-440. 
Douglas,  James,  425. 
Duff,     David,    his    translation    of 

Browning's  Sordello,  357. 
Du  Manrier,  George,  508. 
Duncan,  Norman,  504. 
Dynamic  of  Christianity,  The,  dted, 

31  n.,  169  n.,  182  n. 
Dynasts,  The,  Hardy,  545,  557. 

*  Early  Christian'  Novel,  510,  511. 

Elarly  Oriel  School,  334. 

Edgeworth,  Maria,  and  Jane  Aus- 
ten, 242,  243 ;  circumstances  of 
her  life,  243,  244;  her  work 
wholesome,  245  ;  her  influence  on 
Scott,  248,  249  ;  quoted  on  Scott, 
252. 

Edict  of  Nantes,  162. 

Edinburgh  Review,  apparent  lack  of 
religious  element  in,  127 ;  an  out- 
come of  revolutionary  impulse, 
128 ;  protagonist  of  forward-look- 
ing criticism,  129 ;  organ  of  the 
new  Liberalism,  131 ;  early  vol- 
umes of,  moderate  tone  in,  132 ; 
Sydney  Smith  on,  140 ;  religious 
note  struck  in  A  Concise  State- 
ment of  the  Question  regarding  the 
Abolition  of  the  Slave  Trade  pub- 
lished in,  140;  its  aversion  to 
mysticism,  143. 

Eggleston,  Edward,  507. 

Egoist,  The,  George  Meredith,  537- 
539. 

Eldon,  Lord,  Conservative,  135. 

Eliot,  George,  on  Cowper's  The 
Task,  45 ;  the  historian  of  con- 
science, 302  ;  the  '  serious  person ' 
in  fiction  begins  with,  303  ;  her 
humour,  305  ;  her  dependence  for 
material  upon  the  characters  and 
problems  of  religion,  305-307; 
her  appreciation  of  the  worth  of 
common  life  and  sense  of  its 
pathos  and  mystery,  308;  her  dis- 
tinctively Christian  note,  310 ;  her 
'  local  colour,'  497,  498. 

Elizabeth,  Adventures  in  RUgen,  on 
Wordsworth's  Prelude,  62. 

Elliott,  Ebenezer,  329,  330. 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  on  Hiawatha^  73; 


668 


INDEX 


on  Carlyle,  212 ;  heir  to  the  Pu- 
ritan heritage,  341,  342;  was 
incurably  relig-ious,  343,  344 ; 
Kuskin  on,  344  n. ;  his  artificial 
multiplication  of  aphorisms  just 
tolerable,  534. 

England,  assimilated  the  results  of 
the  Revolution,  328. 

English  language,  debtor  to  religion, 
16. 

Enoch  Arden,  Tennyson,  883,  384. 

Essays  in  Ecclesiastical  Biography, 
Sir  James  Stephen,  169. 

Evangelicals,  English,  Cowper  the 
poet  of,  45,  49  ;  due  to  Wesleyan 
origin,  163 ;  to  an  extent  carried 
on  the  great  Puritan  tradition, 
164  ;  not  lacking  in  humour,  167, 
169;  often  caricatured,  167; 
characterization  of,  167-170 ; 
their  contribution  to  English  lit- 
erature is  considerable,  1G8 ;  al- 
leged narrowness  of,  173 ;  the 
Calvinism  of,  185.  See  Clapham 
Sect. 

Evangeline,  Longfellow,  345,  346. 

Evolution,  doctrine  of,  hesitation  of 
men  in  presence  of,  414-416 ;  not 
identical  with  materialism,  416, 
417. 

Excursion,  The,  Wordsworth,  66, 
68,  71,  72,  74-77. 

Faber,  Father,  197. 

Factory  acts,  176. 

Fairbairn,  Dr.  A.  M.,  cited,  370  n. 

Faith,  humour  linked  to,  47,  240, 
556 ;  of  its  essence  to  be  con- 
structive, 330;  literature's  debt 
to,  487-494;  in  Phillpotts's 
works,  555. 

Family,  development  of  the,  19. 

Farrar,  Dean,  504. 

"Festus,"  Bailey,  425,  426. 

Fiction,  compared  with  history, 
237 ;  range  of,  wider  than  that 
of  any  critical  school  or  sect, 
238 ;  when  honest,  bears  its  mes- 
sage, 238  ;  becomes  a  craft  and 
faces  the  danger  of  '^schools,' 
303,  497 ;  '  local  colour'  in,  497- 
499  ;  writers  of,  bound  to  take  ac- 
count of  religion,  500 ;  recent, 
601, 502 ;  religious,  502-504 ;  the 


'Early    Christian'    Novel,    510, 

511 ;     theological,    blb-b24  ;    of 

the  '  social  problem,'  524-532. 
Fijine  at  the  Fair,  Browning,  363. 
Fiske,  John,  419,  420. 
FitzGerald,  Edward,  455-459. 
FitzRoy,  Captain,   of    the  Beagle, 

403. 
Foreign  Bible  Society,  133. 
Fox,  W.  J.,  364. 
Framley  Parsonage,  Trollope,  299, 

302. 
Freeman,  Mrs.  See  Wilkins,  Mary 

E. 
Free-will,  doctrine  of,  12. 
Froude,  Hurrell,  193. 
Fronde,  James  Anthony,  204,  440, 

441. 
Fuller,  Margaret,  2. 

Galton,  Francis,  his  studies  about 
men  of  genius,  25. 

Gaskell,  Mrs.,  Cranford  and  Mary 
Barton,  295;  religious  element 
in,  331. 

Genesis,  quoted,  11 ;  mentioned,  17. 

Genius,  men  of,  not  to  be  judged 
by  a  special  rule,  112,  113. 

German  language,  its  obligation  to 
religion,  16. 

Gifford,  Wm.,  a  narrow  nature,  146. 

Gilder,  R.  W.,  492. 

Gisborne,  Thomas,  173. 

Gissing,  George,  278 ;  Chesterton 
on,  278;  The  Nether  World, 
526-531  ;  a  great  master  of  tra- 
gedy, 530 ;  the  ethical  and  spirit- 
ual note  in  his  work,  531,  532. 

Gladstone,  W.  E.,  Gleanings,  cited, 
143  n. 

God,  the  name  given  by  Man  to  the 
Vital  Force  that  dwells  at  the 
source  of  things,  10  ;  the  object 
of  search  of  religion,  11;  idea 
of,  refined  and  enlarged  by  sci- 
ence, 420,  421. 

Godwin,  Mary,  314. 

Godwin,  William,  313-315. 

Godwin,  William,  Jr.,  314. 

Goethe,  J.  W.  von,  mentioned,  21 ; 
his  faith  in  daemonic  influence, 
93  ;  on  his  tribute  to  Byron,  103  n. 

Goldsmith,  Oliver,  31. 

Gordon,  C.  W.,  504. 


INDEX 


569 


Gosse,      Edmnnd,      on     Matthew 

Arnold,  4:33. 
Gothic  Scriptures,  16. 
Grant,  Anne,  on  Cowper,  48. 
Gray,  Asa,  419. 
Gray,  Maxwell,  508. 
Greek  polytheism,  66-68. 
Green,  J.  iJ.,  Letters  of,  referred  to, 

In. 
Greene,  G.  A.,  487. 
Grote,  George,  321,  322  n. 
Grotesque,  the,  worshippers  of,  Poe 

the  high-priest  of,  261 ;  smacks 

of  humour  or  of  horror,  264,  265  ; 

of  terror,  grimness  which  verges 

upon,  in  works  of  Charlotte  and 

Emily  Bronte,  267. 

Hampden,  R.  D.,  334. 

Hardy,  Thomas,  his  later  novels 
lacking  in  humour,  47,  549,  557 ; 
identifies  nature  with  the  lot  of 
man,  545  ;  his  Spirits,  545,  546 ; 
The  Dynasts,  545,  557 ;  the  at- 
mosphere of  his  scenes,  546-548 ; 
has  outgrown  his  crudities,  but 
has  become  more  pessimistic,  548, 
649  ;  his  use  of  rustic  choruses 
and  his  humour  have  decreased, 
549,  557;  The  Return  of  the 
Native  and  The  Woodlanders  re- 
present his  most  characteristic 
work.  550,  551  ;  Tess  and  Jude, 
551,  552  ;  compared  with  Phill- 
potts,  552  ;  his  introduction  of  a 
malevolent  chance,  553 ;  religfion 
in,  556. 

Harraden,  Beatrice,  520. 

Harte,  Bret,  507. 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  his  work  not 
unreal,  269 ;  mystery  an  essential 
element  in  his  work,  269 ;  takes 
little  heed  of  stage  properties, 
270 ;  teaches  that  true  life  is  to 
be  expressed  in  terms  of  the 
spirit,  271 ;  heir  to  the  Puritan 
heritage,  341,  342. 

Hay,  John,  524. 

Hazlitt,  Wm.,  on  the  French  Revo- 
lution, 129;  marked  by  more  un- 
lovely Unitarian  characteristics, 
150 ;  had  a  measure  of  truly  dis- 
cerning liberality,  151  ;  had  a 
mordant,  atrabilious  temper,  152. 


Hebrew  prophet.  See  Prophet, 

Hellas,  Shelley's  chorus  from,  125. 

Henderson  ,  Mrs.  M.  S.,  cited,  468  n. 

Henley,  W.  E.,  quoted,  458,  459; 
his  defiant  attitude  toward  Fate, 
485,  486  ;  his  bumptiousness  of 
self-assertion,  516. 

Henslow,  J.  S.,  Professor  of  Botany, 
403. 

Hiaicatha,  Longfellow,  345,  346. 

Historians,  must  interpret  as  well  as 
depict,  496. 

History,  compared  with  the  novel, 
237. 

Holland,  J.  G.,  503. 

Holmes,  O.  W.,  heir  to  the  Puritan 
heritage,  .341,  342. 

House  of  Eld,  The,  Stevenson,  540- 
542. 

Howells,  W.  D.,  on  Scott,  251 ;  as  a 
depicter  of  New  England  life,  505. 

Humour,  and  melancholy,  associa- 
tion between,  46 ;  in  Hardy,  47, 
549, 557  ;  linked  to  faith,  47,  240, 
556  ;  not  lacking  in  the  Puritan 
character,  164-167 ;  a  quick  sense 
of  life's  lesser  incongruities,  239 ; 
man  of,  sometimes  depressed,  241; 
a  comprehensive  term,  241 ;  minis- 
ters to  faith  and  becomes  an  ally  of 
religion, 242 ;  in  George  Eliot, 305. 

Hunger,  a  theme  of  religion  and 
literature,  19. 

Hunt,  Leigh,  a  radical,  152 ;  illus- 
trates that  grace  which  sufFereth 
long  and  is  kind,  153. 

Hutchinson,  Colonel,  no  morose  sti- 
fler  of  mirth,  165. 

Hutton,  R.  H.,  cited,  94  n.,  241  n. ; 
on  Clough,  426. 

Huxley,  T.  H.,  his  prominence  and 
influence  partly  due  to  fact  that 
he  became  a  theologian,  24,  25 ; 
quoted,  409,  413,  416,  417;  a 
theological  controversialist  of  the 
keenest  type,  413,  414;  on  doc- 
trine of  Evolution,  416,  417 ;  dis- 
claimed materialism,  418. 

Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty,  Shel- 
ley's, quoted,  120,  121. 

Hypatia,  Kingsley,  298. 

Idealism,  influence  upon  literature, 
341. 


570 


INDEX 


Idylls,  Tennyson,  378-383. 
Imlay,  Fanny,  314. 
In  Memoriam,  Tennyson,  374-377. 
Industrial  centres,  large  ideas  often 

find  welcome  in,  512. 
Inspiration,  of  the  Old  Testament, 

17,  18 ;  of  the  Bible,  Coleridge's 

view  of,  87-89. 

Jacob,  17. 

James,  Henry,  as  a  depicter  of  New 

England  life,  505. 
James,  William,  427. 
Jane  Eyre,  Bronte,  267. 
Jeffrey,   Francis,   on  Wordsworth, 

144,  145. 
Jewett,  Sarah  Orne,  506. 
John    Inglesantf    Shorthouse,    511, 

513,  514. 
Johnson,  Samuel,  23. 
Jones,  Ernest,  424. 
Jones,  Professor  Henry,  218. 
Jowett,  Benjamin,  334. 
Jungle,  The,  Sinclair,  524. 

Keats,  John,  on  Bums,  55 ;  Carlyle 
on,  201. 

Keble,  John,  191,  192,  194,  195. 

King  James  Version  of  the  Bible,  16. 

Kingsley,  Charles,  thought  of  as  an 
essentially  virileperson,  296 ;  emo- 
tional in  the  best  sense,  297 ; 
Yeast  and  Alton  Locke,  297,  298  ; 
Hypatia  and  Westward  Ho !  298 ; 
Two  Years  Ago,  298  ;  his  place  in 
literature  due  greatly  to  his  ap- 
preciation of  vitality  of  religion, 
299 ;  religion  in,  331. 

Kingsley,  Henry,  296. 

Kipling,  Rudyard,  quoted,  69,161 ; 
gives  evidence  of  the  vigour  which 
faith  lends  to  poetry,  489,  492, 
493  ;  not  a  great  novelist,  540 ;  in 
him  the  will  to  live  appears,  540 ; 
has  conviction  of  power  under- 
lying appearances,  543,  544 ;  his 
love  of  the  ghostly,  544 ;  has  con- 
tributed to  the  literature  of  devo- 
tion, 544. 

Lamb,  Charles,  best-loved  figure  in 
English  letters,  154 ;  a  seamy  side 
to  his  life,  154 ;  his  works  have  an 
undercurrent  of  influence  towaxd 


the  cherishing  of  the  gfreat  Chris- 
tian graces,  155. 

Lang,  Andrew,  on  Lowell,  348  n. ; 
on  the  '  Early  Christian '  Novel, 
511. 

Language,  development  of,  through 
religion,  16;  of  religion,  part  it 
has  played  in  the  making  of  litera- 
ture, 560. 

Laws  of  Nature,  418. 

Lays  of  Ancient  Bomef  Macaulay, 
181. 

Le  Conte,  cited,  414  n. ;  popularizer 
of  evolution,  419,  420. 

Le  Gallienne,  Richard,  cited,  468. 

Liberalism,  represented  by  the 
Edinburgh,  131. 

Liberals  of  early  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, the  true  Conservatives,  134. 

Literature,  great,  takes  account  of 
the  Universe,  1 ;  and  religion,  old 
and  dear  companions,  2 ;  cry  for 
a  national,  5 ;  close  relation  be- 
tween religion  and,  13,  18;  de- 
pends upon  vision  and  sympathy, 
but  deals  with  the  matters  of  the 
common  day,  13 ;  a  gift  of  the 
imagination,  13, 14 ;  the  Scriptures 
as,  16 ;  love  how  related  to,  18-21 ; 
religion  sometimes  the  chief  ma- 
terial of,  22,  23;  of  implicit  or 
avowed  unbelief,  relation  to  reli- 
gion, 23-25;  precedent  influence 
of  religion  upon,  25-28 ;  relation 
between  the  office  of  the  minister 
of  religion  and  the  production  of, 
25-27 ;  activity  in,  often  follows 
religious  revival,  558 ;  great,  can 
spring  only  from  the  deeper  ex- 
periences of  life,  561. 

Literature,  English,  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  its  range  and  wealth  enor- 
mous, 4;  its  public  numerically 
great,  with  keen,  facile  mind,  4, 5  ; 
includes  the  product  of  America, 
as  well  as  that  of  England,  5, 6 ;  in 
the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  cen- 
turies, characteristics  of,  30,  31 ; 
great,  product  of  earlier  half  of  the 
century,  32 ;  influence  of  religion 
upon,  as  seen  in  Cowper,  4CM8, 
60 ;  in  Crabbe,  53,  60 ;  in  Bums, 
56,  57,  60;  in  Blake,  58,  59,  60; 
in  Wordsworth,  66-77;  in  Cole- 


INDEX 


571 


ridge,  79-90;  in  Shelley,  120- 
126  ;  in  De  Quincey,  158-160;  in- 
fluence of  Claphara  Evangeli- 
cals on,  175 ;  significance  of  Chris- 
tian missions  to,  179,  340,  341 ; 
place  which  the  Tractarian  Move- 
ment occupies  in,  192-198 ;  abun- 
dance of  material  in  mid-Victorian 
years,  350,  351 ;  and  religion,  con- 
tact between,  in  Browning  and 
Tennyson,  364-369 ;  part  the  lan- 
guage of  religion  has  played  in 
the  making  of,  560 ;  religion  has 
profited  from,  560,  561. 

*  Local  colour,'  497-i99,  548. 

London,  Jack,  524. 

London  Magazine,  writers  for,  130 ; 
of  radical  tendency,  131. 

Longfellow,  H.  W.,  his  verses  on 
Burns,  56,  57 ;  heir  to  the  Puri- 
tan heritage,  341,  342 ;  the  do- 
mestic character  of  his  poems, 
344-346 ;  a  deft  craftsman,  345. 

Love,  how  related  to  religion  and 
literature,  18-21 ;  orig^  and  de- 
velopment of,  19-21. 

Lowell,  J.  R.,  heir  to  the  Puritan 
heritage,  341, 342 ;  moves  in  realm 
of  concrete,  344 ;  shrewd,  hu- 
mourous, and  right-minded,  346 ; 
the  ethical  import  of  his  writings 
was  the  natural  expression  of  his 
convictions,  347  ;  the  secret  of  the 
ethical  import  of  his  writings, 
348. 

Lucian,  his  claim  to  remembrance, 
24. 

Lucretius,  verses  on,  22. 

Luther,  Martin,  16. 

Lyell,  Sir  Charles,  letter  of  Darwin 
to,  quoted,  405. 

Macaulay,  T.  B.,  and  Wordsworth's 
Preludej  62 ;  his  literary  fame, 
180,  181;  extent  to  which  the 
Clapham  tradition  or  influence 
is  traceable  in,  181-183 ;  quoted, 
182,  18S ;  on  Jane  Austen,  246. 

Macaulay,  Zachary,  174. 

MacCunn,  John,  cited,  322  n.,  331  n. 

Macdonald,  George,  515-517. 

Mackail,  J.  W..  on  Ruskin,  232,  233. 

Mackay,  Charles,  425. 

Malet,  Lucas,  508. 


Mallock,  W.  H.,  his  recipe  for  writ- 
ing a  Satanic  poem,  97. 

Man,  and  Nature,  belong  to  each 
other,  9;  his  life  work,  11;  his 
mastery  of  circumstances,  11,  13 ; 
refuses  to  be  permanently  sub- 
jugated by  the  Universe,  11  ;  his 
littleness  and  greatness,  15 ;  sci- 
ence has  improved  his  estimate  of 
himself,  421,  422. 

Manly,  Prof.  J.  M.,  on  Qeorge  Mere- 
dith, 534  n. 

Mansel,  H.  L.,  his  Bampton  Lec- 
tures, 334. 

Marmontel,  J.  F.,  Memoirs,  324,325. 

Marryat,  Captain,  258-260. 

Marshall,  Archibald,  508. 

Martineau,  James,  337-339. 

Martyn,  Henry,  174,  178,  179,  180. 

Mary  Barton,  Mrs.  Gaskell,  295. 

Mas&on,  Prof.,  on  Kingsley,  299. 

Materialism,  416-418. 

Matthews,  Brander,  on  Scott,  252 ; 
on  Hawthorne  and  Poe,  271. 

Maurice,  Frederick  Denison,  his 
preference  for  the  word  '  theo- 
logy,' 335  ;  the  heir  of  Coleridge 
in  things  religious  and  philosophi- 
cal, 335  ;  his  gospel,  335, 336  ;  let- 
ter to  his  mother,  336 ;  a  chief 
power  in  the  "  Christian  Social- 
ism "  movement,  337. 

Mazzini,  on  the  study  of  astronomy, 
1  ;  his  tribute  to  Byron,  103  n.  ;  his 
radicalism,  331,  332  ;  "  God  and 
the  People,"  his  creed,  332  ;  and 
Carlyle,  332,  333 ;  the  ethical  and 
religious  complexion  of  his  writ- 
ings, 333  ;  on  religion,  454. 

McGiffert,  Prof.  A.  C,  cited,  526  n. 

Melancholy,  and  humour,  associa- 
tion between,  46. 

Meredith,  George,  one  of  the  great 
masters  of  life's  secrets,  462  ;  his 
literary  style,  463  ,  his  sanity  in 
ethics  and  religion,  464,  465 ; 
Modern  Love,  465,  466 ;  Jump-to- 
Glory  Jane,  466-468 ;  "  erotic  eso- 
tery,"  472;  his  prose  has  same 
characteristics  as  his  poetry,  533 ; 
his  artificial  multiplication  of 
aphorisms  intolerable,  534,  535; 
his  tendency  to  overdo,  535  ;  Rich- 
ard Feverel,  534-537  ;  a  great  ere- 


572 


INDEX 


ator  of  character,  535 ;  The  Egoist, 
537-539. 

Methodism,  too  often  known  by  its 
accidents  rather  than  its  essence, 
161  ;  a  sense  in  which  the  Church 
of  England  is  the  mother  of,  163; 
originated  Evangelical  move- 
ment, 163. 

Meynell,  Mrs.,  quoted,  386,  488. 

Mill,  James,  311,  312,  318,  319. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  an  heir  to  atheism,  318, 
321 ;  his  education,  319, 320  ;  illus- 
trates the  fascination  of  religion 
for  the  human  mind,  321 ;  saw 
that  there  is  an  experience  of  the 
heart  as  well  as  of  the  head,  322  ; 
did  not  truckle  to  popular  opinion, 
323 ;  his  spiritual  crisis,  324 ;  used 
forms  of  religious  expression,  324, 
325 ;  and  Marmontel's  Memoirs, 
324,  325  ;  his  marriage,  325,  326  ; 
his  Three  Essays  on  Religion,  326  ; 
finds  a  place  for  religion,  326, 
327 

Milman,  H.  H.,  334. 

Milner,  Isaac,  168.  173,  176. 

Milner,  Joseph,  his  Church  History, 
176. 

Milton,  John,  mentioned,  18  ;  his 
purpose  in  Paradise  Lost  was  to 
justify  the  ways  of  God  to  man, 
22. 

Ministers  of  religion,  relation  be- 
tween their  office  and  the  produc- 
tion of  literature,  25-27,  560. 

*  Minor  poetry,'  460,  461. 

Mirabeau,  represents  the  better  ele- 
ment of  the  Past,  91. 

Misanthropy,  incompatible  with 
genuine  tragedy,  100. 

Missionary  activity,  340,  341. 

Missions,  significance  to  literature, 
179. 

Moody,  William  Vaughn,  486. 

Morley,  Lord,  on  Byron,  105,  106  ; 
on  Mill's  Three  Essays  on  Religion, 
326. 

Monis,  William,  450-454. 

Moses,  17. 

Mozley,  Thomas,  Reminiscences,  193. 

Munger,  T.  T.,  on  the  Christian 
value  of  literature,  21  ;  quoted, 
on  Hawthorne,  271. 

Myers,  F.  W.  H.,  quoted,  386. 


Mystery,  in  Poe,  266  ;  in  Haw- 
thorne, 269. 

Mysticism,  element  of,  in  William 
Blake,  58 ;  of  Wordsworth,  65  ; 
Whig  aversion  to,  143-145 ;  and 
mystics,  441-450,  455,  456,  514. 

Napoleon,  the  soldier  and  builder, 
92. 

Nature,  and  Man,  belong  to  each 
other,  9 ;  elemental  forces  of, 
must  serve  man,  11. 

Necessitarianism,  in  Thomson,  479. 

Nether  World,  The,  Gissing,  526- 
531. 

New  England,  novelists  who  depict 
the  life  of,  505,  506. 

Newman,  Cardinal,  cited,  161  n., 
168  n.;  an  immediate  link  between 
the  Tractarians  and  the  Evangel- 
icals, 189,  190 ;  character  of,  191, 
192,  194;  his  poetry,  195;  his 
prose,  195,  196 ;  on  Carlyle,  213. 

Newton,  John,  and  Cowper,  40,  41. 

Nichol,  John,  cited,  93  n.,  203  n., 
224  n.;  quoted,  211. 

Novel,  compared  with  history,  237. 
See  Fiction. 

Omar  Khayyam,   FitzGeraJd,  455, 

457. 

Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel,  The^ 
George  Mereditli,  534-537. 

Orr,  Mrs.  Sutherland,  cited  364  n. 

Overton,  Canon,  on  the  religious  ele- 
ment in  Cowper,  45,  46. 

Oxford  Movement,  essentially  ro- 
mantic, 188;  its  place  in  English 
letters,  192-198. 

Paine,  Thomas,  his  name  associ- 
ated with  religion,  24. 

Pantheism,  66. 

Pascal,  Thoughts,  quoted,  16  n. 

"  Passion  of  the  Past,"  385, 387,  450, 
451. 

Pater,  Walter,  511. 

Paul,  Herbert,  Stray  Leaves,  309  n. 

Paul,  Kegan,  314  n. 

Pessimism,  474-484. 

Phillips,  Stephen,  490, 491. 

Phillpotts,  compared  with  Hardy, 
552 ;  his  introduction  of  a  male- 
volent   chance,    553,   554;    The 


INDEX 


573 


Secret  Woman,  553-555 ;  the  part 
that  faith  plays  in  his  works,  555- 
557. 

Pippa  Passes,  Browning,  390,  391. 

Pitt,  William,  170. 

Poe,  E.  A.,  his  character,  260,  201 ; 
his  personal  attitude  toward  faith, 
261 ;  the  high-priest  of  all  who 
worship  the  grotesque,  261  ;  his 
work  a  religious  apologetic,  262  ; 
his  tales  without  hope,  but  full 
of  a  haunting  fear,  265-267  ;  his 
mastery  of  mechanism,  269,  270, 
271. 

Poet,  the  great,  sees  both  the  tra- 
gedy and  the  comedy,  106,  107. 

Polytheism,  Greek,  66-68. 

Pope,  Alexander,  22,  23. 

Powell,  Baden,  334,  405. 

Pragmatism,  376,  392. 

Pre-Raphaelites,  443,  449. 

Priestley,  Joseph,  312,  313. 

Prometheus  Unbound,  Shelley%  not 
a  poem  of  negation,  122-124. 

Prophecy,  spirit  of,  active  in  the 
world's  affairs  in  first  half  of  nine- 
teenth century,  33. 

Prophets,  Hebrew,  rarely  qualified 
their  statements  and,  therefore, 
often  seemingly  contradictory, 
209-211. 

Psalms,  quoted,  14,  15. 

Puritanism,  of  Emerson,  Bryant, 
and  others,  341,  342,  347- 

Puritans,  by  no  means  without  a 
sense  of  humour,  164-167 ;  the 
realities  of  their  life  were  solemn, 
164,  165  ;  understood  with  diffi- 
culty by  Scott,  254 ;  Scott's  de- 
piction of,  256,  257. 

Quarterly  Peview,  apparent  lack  of 
religious  element  in,  127;  pro- 
tagonist of  reactionary  criticism, 
129 ;  champion  of  high  Tory  faith 
in  Church  and  State,  130  ;  early 
volumes  of,  moderate  tone  in,  132, 
133  ;  contributors  expressed  reli- 
gion in  conventional  form,  145. 

Radicalism,  of  Mazzini,  332  ;  coun- 
terpart of,  within  the  Church  of 
England.  3:^;  of  Bushnell  and 
Martineau,  oSS,  339. 


Radicals,  the  mere,  in  danger  of 
falling  in  love  with  change  for 
its  own  sake,  136-138  ;  their  views 
and  practice,  138. 

Rationalism,  of  the  Evangelicals, 
185;  its  assault  upon  religion, 
316-318. 

Reade,  Charles,  299. 

Religion,  and  literature,  old  and 
dear  companions,  2  ;  the  last  cen- 
tury a  time  of  theological  revolu- 
tion, 2,  3 ;  science  takes  account 
of,  3,  4 ;  derivation  of  the  word, 
6,  7 ;  increase  of  the  content  of 
the  word,  7;  its  characteristics,  7, 
8;  binds  the  incidents  of  man's 
life  into  a  vital  whole,  7 ;  speaks 
many  languages,  and  a  joy  to  such 
as  heed  its  message,  8  ;  believes 
in  and  proclaims  the  Universe,  9 ; 
seeks  and  follows  God,  11 ;  calls 
men  to  a  consideration  of  the 
greatness  of  their  life  upon  the 
earth,  12;  its  understanding  of 
salvation,  12,  13;  depends  upon 
vision  and  sympathy,  but  deals 
with  the  matters  of  the  common 
day,  13 ;  close  relation  between 
literature  and,  13,  14,  18,  22 ;  a 
gift  of  the  imagination,  13,  14; 
and  development  of  language, 
16 ;  human  love  how  related  to, 
18-21 ;  sometimes  the  chief  ma- 
terial of  literature,  22,  23;  re- 
lation of  literature  of  implicit 
or  avowed  unbelief  to,  23-25; 
precedent  influence  of,  upon  lit- 
erature, 2.5-28;  element  of,  in 
Cowper,  40-48, 60 ;  in  Crabbe.  53, 
60 ;  in  Burns,  56,  57,  60 ;  in  Blake, 
58,  59,  60;  connection  of,  with 
literature,  in  Wordsworth,  66-77 ; 
in  Coleridge,  79-90;  in  Shelley, 
120-126;  questions  of,  moder- 
ately touched  upon  in  early  vol- 
umes of  the  Reviews,  131-134; 
note  of,  struck  in  the  Edinburgh, 
140  ;  part  of  the  Tory  stock  in 
trade,  14.5  ;  in  words  and  thoughts 
of  Southey,  148  ;  and  the  Chaldee 
Manuscript,  148,  149 ;  of  De  Quin- 
cey,  158-160 ;  revival  of,  under 
Wesley,  161 ;  Clapham  and  Ox- 
ford Movements,  161-198 ;  of  Car- 


674 


INDEX 


lyle,  206;  of  Scott,  253,  254; 
office  of,  to  reassure,  263  ;  always 
makes  for  courage,  263 ;  appeal 
of,  to  Dickens,  276 ;  of  Kingsley, 
298,  331;  of  Trollope,  300;  of 
George  Eliot,  302-310 ;  the  ration- 
alist's assault  upon,  316-318;  in 
Mrs.  Gaskell,  330 ;  Mazzini's,  332, 
333;  of  Maurice,  334-336;  of 
Bushnell  and  Martineau,  338, 339; 
religious  controversy  due  in  great 
measure  to  the  dogmatism  of 
Christianity,  339 ;  attitude  of  the 
orthodox,  340 ;  missionary  activ- 
ity, 340,  341 ;  and  literature,  con- 
tact between,  in  Browning  and 
Tennyson,  364-369  ;  value  of,  to 
Browning  and  Tennyson,  as  poets, 
369 ;  and  science,  can  live  to- 
gether, 400,  401  ;  has  a  keen  ear 
for  life's  discords,  465  ;  unrest  in, 
largely  due  to  many  new  undi- 
gested discoveries,  525  ;  note  of, 
in  George  Meredith,  535,  539  ;  in 
Stevenson,  540-544;  in  Phillpotts, 
555-557  ;  in  Hardy,  556  ;  revival 
of,  generally  followed  by  period 
of  literary  activity,  558;  science 
has  sometimes  given  rise  to  dis- 
cussions about,  558,  559 ;  '  social 
problem  '  implicates,  559  ;  wide 
range  accorded  to,  in  this  book, 
559 ;  ministers  of,  men  of  letters 
bred  in  the  homes  of,  560;  lan- 
guage of,  part  it  has  played  in  the 
making  of  literature,  560;  has 
profited  by  its  connection  with 
literature,  560,  561 ;  reason  for 
its  influence  upon  literature,  561. 

Renan,  J.  K,  511. 

Hevelation,  capable  of  development, 
317. 

Revivals,  religious,  161,  162,  558. 

Revolt  of  Islam,  The,  Shelley's, 
quoted,  119. 

Revolution,  French,  three  types  of 
men  in,  91, 92  ;  either  inspired  or 
necessitated  the  literary  awaken- 
ing of  which  the  Edinburgh,  etc., 
were  the  fruit,  128 ;  seems  to  have 
BufPered  a  sea-change  in  crossing 
the  channel,  128  ;  Hazlitt  on,  129. 

Robert  Elsmere,  Mrs.  Humphry 
Ward,  617-519. 


Roberts,  C.  G.  D.,  488. 

Robinson,  A.  Mary  F.,  Madame 
Darmesteter,  482. 

Robinson,  Crabb,  quoted,  315. 

Roe,  E.  P.,  503. 

Rogers,  Samuel,  anecdote  of,  322  n. 

RoUeston,  Mr.,  486. 

Romanes,  George  John,  goes  to 
Cambridge  and  becomes  a  Dar- 
winian, 394 ;  his  Physiological  Se- 
lection, 395 ;  as  a  man,  395 .  his 
loss  of  faith,  396,  397 ;  further 
change  of  view  and  last  years, 
398,  399  ;  his  experience  typical, 
399  ;  letter  of  Darwin  to,  quoted, 
402. 

Ross,  G.  A.  Johnstone,  cited,  454  n. 

Rossetti,  Christina,  443,  446-448. 

Rossetti,  Dante  Gabriel,  449,  450. 

Ruskin,  John,  gently  reared,  220; 
middle-class  in  origin,  220 ;  more 
gracious  than  Carlyle  in  the  gen- 
eral tenor  of  his  message,  221 ; 
religion  entered  into  the  substance 
of  his  pre-natal  life,  221 ;  religious 
home  training,  221,  222  ;  his  own 
testimony  to  the  work  of  his  re- 
ligious home  training,  222  ;  much 
of  his  influence  due  to  his  evan- 
gelical faith,  233  ;  and  Carlyle, 
similarity  of  their  bringing  up 
and  belief,  224,  225  ;  his  preach- 
ing, grotesque,  exaggerated,  emo- 
tional, 226  ;  commonly  taken  for 
granted  that  his  doctrine  lacked 
continuity  and  system,  226 ;  true 
to  guiding  principles,  227  ;  in  ac- 
cord with  doctrine  of  personality, 
227,  230,  232;  his  doctrine  of 
greatness  of  style  in  art,  228-230 ; 
Unto  this  Last,  and  Munera  Pul- 
veris,  231 ;  resigns  himself  to  the 
prophet's  fate,  232 ;  has  always 
the  manner  of  a  sincere  man,  233  ; 
his  frankness,  233  ;  his  sense  of 
humour,  234 ;  an  effective  preach- 
er, 235 ;  on  Emerson,  344  n. 

Russell,  G.  W.  E.,  cited,  142  n.,  143 
n.,  442  n. 

Ruth,  17. 

Rydberg,  Victor,  511. 

Saintsbury,  Prof.  G.  E.  B.,  on  Byron, 

96,  104. 


INDEX 


575 


Salvation,  religion  has  much  to  say 
upon,  12 ;  a  possession  of  the 
place  and  power  of  mastery  which 
belong  to  man  of  right,  12 ;  how 
attained,  13  ;  means  mastery  of 
circumstance,  19. 

Saul,  18. 

Schelling,  quoted,  370. 

*  Schools  '  of  literature,  497. 

Schreiner,  Olive,  520-522. 

Science,  takes  account  of  religion, 
3,  4  ;  has  resolved  the  contradic- 
tions of  the  Greek  polytheism,  67 ; 
and  religion,  can  live  together, 
400,  401  ;  great  popularizers  of, 
always  in  some  degree  theolo- 
gians, 419;  idea  of  God  refined 
and  enlarged  by,  420,  421;  has 
improved  man's  estimate  of  him- 
self, 421,  422 ;  has  sometimes 
given  rise  to  religious  discussions, 
558,  559. 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  on  Coleridge,  79, 
80  ;  his  lameness,  95  ;  on  Byron, 
101 ;  his  indebtedness  to  Maria 
Edge  worth  and  Jane  Austen,  248, 
249;  not  a  reactionary,  250;  a 
believer,  251  ;  a  '  maker,*  251 ; 
Howells'  criticism  of,  251 ;  Bran- 
der  Matthews  on,  252  ;  Bagehot's 
criticism  of,  253, 257  ;  his  religion, 
253,  254 ;  understood  the  Puritan 
with  difficulty,  254 ;  made  Puri- 
tan and  Covenanter  types  ex- 
treme, 255  ;  discerned  the  source 
of  his  country's  power,  256 ;  his 
depiction  of  the  Puritan,  256, 
257 ;  his  world  essentially  divine, 
257,  258. 

Scripture,  extraordinary  literary 
quality  of,  16 ;  the  inerrancy  of, 
a  superstition,  in  Coleridge's  time, 
86;  Coleridge's  attitude  toward, 
87-89.  See  Bible. 

Seeley,  J.  R.,  on  Carlyle,  207. 

Shairp,  J.  C,  cited,  84  n. 

Shakespeare,  William,  362,  535. 

Sharp,  William,  cited,  349,  365; 
quoted,  358. 

Sharpe,  Granville,  not  narrow,  173 ; 
his  exposition  of  apocalyptic 
Scriptures,  177 ;  his  contributions 
to  history  and  literature,  177. 

Shaw,  Bernard,  cited,  531. 


1  Shelley,  P.  B.,  contrasted  with  By- 

!  ron,  107, 108 ;  an  iconoclast  among 
social  conventions,  108 ;  his  essen- 
tial rightness  of  purpose,  109; 
carried  the  Protestant  spirit  to 
its  extreme,  109;  could  not  sus- 
pend his  judgement,  109;  his 
relations  to  Harriet  Westbrook 
and  Mary  Godwin,  110;  a  great 
poet  in  spite  of  his  morals.  111 ; 
morally  and  physically  coura- 
geous, 113;  pure  in  thought  and 
life,  114,  115;  loved  sports,  but 
reckless  and  somewhat  inefficient, 
114 ;  anecdote  of  his  getting  be- 
yond his  depth  in  Arno,  115 ;  not 
to  be  judged  by  ordinary  stan- 
dards, 115;  believed  that  facts  of 
experience  must  be  faced,  115; 
his  claim  to  the  possession  of 
reverence,  subject  of  conflicting 
testimony,  116;  had  little  sym- 
pathy with  custom,  117;  his  posi- 
tive doctrine,  118;  the  regenera- 
tion of  mankind,  subject  of  his 
contemplation,  118;  his  descent 
upon  Ireland,  119;  his  testimony 
to  the  place  and  power  of  religion, 
120-126 ;  had  sense  of  largeness 
and  seriousness  of  life,  120 ;  had 
sense  of  ultimate  wholeness  and 
integrity  of  life,  121 ;  Prometheus 
Unbound  not  a  poem  of  negation, 
122-124;  chorus  from  Hellas,  125. 

Ships  that  Pass  in  the  Night,  Harra- 
den,  520. 

Shirley,  Bronte,  267. 

Shore,  John,  Lord  Teignmouth, 
174,  177,  178. 

Shorthouse,  on  humour,  241 ;  cited 
on  Thackeray's  illustrations,  293 
n. ;  John  Inglesant,  511,  513,  514. 

Sienkiewicz,  Henryk,  511. 

Simeon,  Charles,  mentioned,  168; 
Sir  James  Stephen  on,  175;  his 
works,  176. 

Sin,  an  interruption  of  the  natu- 
ral relation  between  man  and 
God,  12. 

Sinclair,  Upton,  The  Jungle,  524. 

Small  things,  worth  of,  13. 

Smith,  Sydney,  on  the  Edinburgh, 
140;  a  sort  of  Greatheart,  141; 
his  passion  for  righteousness  and 


676 


INDEX 


fairness,  142;  might  be  called 
buxom,  142 ;  had  deep  element  of 
spiritual  and  ethical  conviction, 
148 ;  failed  to  respond  to  the  he- 
roic adventure  of  the  early  for- 
eign missionaries,  144 ;  cited,  168. 

*  Social  problem,'  524-532,  559. 

Sophocles,  animated  by  religious 
idea  of  tragedy,  22. 

Sordello,  Browning,  357-360. 

Southey,  Robert,  played  a  larger 
part  in  the  literary  history  of  his 
period  than  it  is  easy  to  realize, 
146 ;  patient,  unselfish,  devoted, 
147  ;  could  perceive  and  appre- 
ciate the  better  side  of  men,  147  ; 
religion  recognized  in  all  he 
thought  and  wrote  as  great  and 
vital  concern  in  life,  148. 

Spencer,  Herbert,  central  thought 
of  his  philosophy  foreshadowed 
in  early  works,  405. 

Spenser,  Edmund,  22. 

Stanley,  A.  P.,  334. 

Stanley,  Sir  Henry  M.,  372. 

Stephen,  FitzJames,  Clapham  heri- 
tage in,  184, 186,  187. 

Stephen,  Sir  James,  his  portrayal  of 
the  Evangelicals,  169 ;  his  liter- 
ary style,  169  n. ;  on  Henry  Thorn- 
ton, 171 ;  on  Charles  Simeon, 175. 

Stephen,  Sir  Leslie,  on  his  father's 
literary  style,  169  n.  ;  Clapham 
heritage  in,  184, 186, 187  ;  on  the 
intellectual  wealth  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  311;  Lowell's  re- 
marks on  reading  his  English. 
Thought  in  the  Eighteenth  Century, 
348 ;  on  Stevenson,  540  n. 

Stevenson,  R.  L.,  on  the  contrast  in 
Man,  15 ;  his  testimony  to  the  ne- 
cessity of  faith,  492,  493 ;  not  a 
g^eat  novelist,  540;  in  him  the  will 
to  live  appears,  540  ;  The  House 
of  Eld,  540-542 ;  religious  note 
in,  540-542 ;  his  ears  open  to  '  the 
still  sad  music  of  humanity,'  542, 
543;  his  consciousness  of  some- 
thing in  man  that  dominates  the 
body,  543 ;  has  conviction  of 
power  underlying  appearances, 
543,  544 ;  his  love  of  the  ghostly, 
544 ;  has  contributed  to  the  liter- 
ature of  devotion,  544. 


Stillman,  W.  J.,  on  religious  belief, 

.397. 

Story  of  an  African  Farm,  The, 
Schreiner,  520-522. 

Strettel,  Alma,  484. 

'  Sunday-School  books,'  502,  503. 

Superstition,  262,  263. 

Swinburne,  C.  A.,  his  testimony  to 
the  influence  of  Coleridge,  79, 
80  ;  on  imagination  and  harmony 
in  poetry,  102,  103  ;  on  Shelley, 
120 ;  a  master  of  poetry's  form 
and  music,  468-470 ;  his  poetry 
as  directed  against  God,  470  ;  his 
poetry  as  directed  against  priests 
and  kings,  470 ;  the  paganism  of 
his  verse,  471,  473,  474;  often 
lack  of  substance  behind  his 
melody,  471 ;  fascinated  with  the 
mystery  of  "erotic  esotery,"  472 ; 
on  Carlyle,  200. 

Sylva,  Carmen,  485. 

Symonds,  J.  A.,  cited,  116  n.;  The 
Temptation  in  the  Wilderness,  488. 

Symons,  Arthur,  cited,  470. 

Task,  The,  Cowper's,  34,  39. 

Teignmouth,  Lord.  See  Shore,  John. 

Tennyson,  Alfred,  on  Crabbe,  54 ; 
ruggedness  of  his  prose  and  his 
conversation,  350  ;  compared  and 
contrasted  with  Browning,  351, 
356,  360,  361,  365-369,  376,  386, 
387  ;  notable  uniformity  of  ex- 
cellence in,  353 ;  his  blank  verse, 
353  ;  his  verse  sometimes  feeble, 
but  still  with  a  grace  of  sound, 
355,  356 ;  essentially  religious, 
360  ;  the  elegance  of  his  poetry, 
361;  his  relation  to'the  Bible,  364- 
369,  382  ;  Aylmer's  Field,  quoted, 
367  ;  his  Ulysses,  370-372 ;  his  no- 
tion of  personality,  372,  373  ;  The 
TwoVoices,  St.  Simeon Stylites,and 
other  poems,  370,^  373,  374 ;  In 
Memoriam,  374-377 ;  prefigures 
something  of  Pragmatism,  376  ; 
his  constructive  argument,  377, 
378 ;  religious  or  theological 
poems,  378 ;  the  Idylls,  378-383 ; 
his  pathos,  383-386. 

Testament,  Old,  literary  quality  of, 
16,  17;  sense  in  which  it  is  in- 
spired, 16-18. 


INDEX 


677 


Thackeray,  W.  M.,  called  a  realist, 
275 ;  his  use  of  Scripture  lan- 
gfuage  in  great  scenes,  286,  287  ; 
The  Adventures  of  Philip,  288 ; 
Vanity  Fair,  289 ;  his  aim  to 
show  that  to  be  without  God  was 
to  be  without  hope,  289  ;  some- 
thing other  than  a  cynic,  290 ;  an 
almost  Homeric  amplitude  to  his 
art,  290 ;  did  not  regard  his  char- 
acters as  puppets,  291 ;  not  a  sen- 
timentalist, 292  ;  his  story  told 
from  standpoint  of  last  chapter, 
292  ;  his  illustrations,  293  n. 

Thomson,  James,  his  Seasons,  31. 

Thomson,  James  [B.  V.],  his  poem 
on  Blake,  59, 60  ;  quoted,  99  ;  his 
career,  474  ;  his  pessimism  in  The 
City  of  Dreadful  Night,  474-478 ; 
Vane's  Story,  478,  479. 

Thompson,  Francis,  489,  491. 

Thornton,  Henry,  hia  generosity, 
170,  171. 

Thornton,  John,  170. 

Tories,  represented  by  the  Quarterly, 
130 ;  not  lacking  in  high-minded 
and  honourable  men,  138- 

Toryism,  religion  part  of  its  stock 
in  trade,  145. 

Tractarian  Movement.  See  Oxford 
Movement. 

Tractarians,  early,  had  something 
of  the  attitude  of  opportunists  ,- 
189. 

Tragedy,  genuine,  beyond  the  reach 
of  a  misanthrope,  100 ;  and 
comedy,  the  great  poet  sees  both, 
106. 

Trelawny,  E.  J.,  on  Shelley,  115. 

Trevelyan,  G.  M.,  184. 

Trevelyan,  Sir  G.  O.,  183. 

Trevelyans,  the,  174. 

Trollope,  Anthony,  299-302. 

TuUoch,  Principal,  on  Coleridge, 
79,  80 ;  cited,  322  n.,  336  n. 

Tupper,  M.  F.,  the  irreproachable, 
425 ;  the  only  English  writer 
who  could  afford  to  make  a  busi- 
ness of  coining  aphorisms,  534. 

Two  Tears  Ago,  Kingsley,  298. 

Tyndall,  John,  his  prominence  and 
influence  partly  due  to  fact  that 
he  became  a  theologian,  24,  25  ; 
on  Wordsworth,  358  n. ;  his  com- 


parison of  Tennyson  and  Carlyle, 
375. 

Ulfilas,  16. 

Ulysses,  Tennyson,  370-372. 

Unbelief,  23. 

Underwood,  F.  H.,  on  Thackeray, 
291,  292. 

Unitarianism  has  been  fruitful  in 
spiritual  Ishmaelites,  150. 

Unitarians,  of  nineteenth  century, 
wherein  they  were  right  and 
wherein  they  were  wrong,  339. 

Universe,  has  a  soul,  9  ;  Man  refuses 
to  be  permanently  subjugated  by, 
11;  forces  of,  must  serve  man, 
11,  12 ;  to  be  treated  as  an  organ- 
ism, 134. 

Utilitarianism,  Mill  the  high  priest 
of,  321 ;  in  how  far  heroic,  333. 

Van  Dyke,  Prof.,  cited,  364. 

Vanity  Fair,  Thackeray,  289. 

Venn,  Henry,  174. 

Venn,  Henry,  son  of  John,  171. 

Venn,  John,  174. 

Venns,  the,  174. 

Vital  Force,  dwells  at  the  source  of 
things,  9  ;  Mind  and  Will  belong 
to,  10 ;  called  God,  10 ;  its  entrance 
into  a  man's  life,  13. 

Wallace,  Lew,  511. 

Ward,  Mrs.  Humphry,  517-519. 

Ward,  W.  G.,  Ideal  of  a  Christian 
Church,  196,  197. 

Watson,  John,  420.  505. 

Watson,  William.  490. 

Watts-Dunton,  his  characterization 
of  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth 
centuries,  30,  32 ;  Renascence  of 
Wonder,  449. 

Wells,  H.  G.,  on  Gissing,  532. 

Wesleys,  the,  and  the  Evangelical 
Movement,  163  ;  difficult  to  tell 
how  much  England  owes  to,  161- 
163 ;  and  Newman,  compared,  168. 

Westward  Ho  !  Kingsley,  298. 

Wharton,  Edith.  507,  508. 

Whately,  Archbishop,  3.34. 

Whig  aversion  to  mysticism,  143- 
145. 

Whigs,  their  views  and  practice, 
138,  139. 


INDEX 


Whitman,  Walt,  490. 

Whittier,  J.  G.,  heir  to  the  Puritan 
heritage,  341,  342  ;  moved  in  the 
realm  of  the  concrete,  344,  345 ; 
on  Lowell,  347. 

Wickliffe,  16. 

Wilberforce,  William,  his  personal 
charm,  171 ;  had  fame  as  an  au- 
thor, 172 ;  a  zealous  Evangelical 
Protestant,  172;  generosity  of 
creed  and  life,  173. 

Wilberforce,  Bishop,  and  the  evolu- 
tionary movement,  409,  411. 

Wilkins,  Mary  E.,  506. 

Wilson,  John,  his  name  most  inti- 
mately associated  with  the  early 
days  of  Blackwood^s,  149. 

Wonder,  is  the  basis  of  learning,  1 ; 
the  nineteenth  century  an  age  of, 
32 ;  capacity  for,  essential  to  com- 
plete mental  and  spiritual  devel- 
opment, 84,  85. 

Woodberry,  G.  E.,  on  Crabbe,  50 ; 
on  Shelley,  109 ;  cited,  342  n. 

Wordsworth,  William,  Prelude  and 
Excursion,  62,  358 ;  sometimes 
prosaic  and  commonplace,  62 ; 
deficient  in  humour,  63  ;  perceived 
the  universal  significance  of  com- 
mon things,  63  ;  his  imagination 
exactly  attuned  to  the  music  of 
life,  63  ;  his  dominant  note  that 
of  calm  and  patient  confidence. 


64 ;  his  interpretation  of  Nature, 
64 ;  his  mysticism,  65  ;  his  poetry 
as  voicing  loneliness,  65,  66  ;  his 
*  pantheism,'  66 ;  in  The  Excursion 
he  sets  forth  the  pagan  view  of 
God,  66 ;  confident  that  a  Spirit 
inhabited  the  earth,  68 ;  a  lonely 
man,  69  ;  the  poet  of  the  isolated 
cottage  and  the  solitary  reaper 
69-71;  the  Soul  the  significant, 
thing  for,  71  ;  his  lapses  into 
homiletic  prose,  72 ;  his  best 
teaching  incidental,  73  ;  saw  the 
essential  factors  of  the  social 
problem,  74 ;  watched  the  ad- 
vances in  industrial  arts  and  man's 
subjugation  of  the  world,  74,  75 ; 
recognizes  kinship  between  man 
and  God,  75,  76 ;  felt  his  mission 
to  be  religious,  76 ;  and  Coleridge, 
and  Samuel  Rogers,  anecdote  of, 
85 ;  Coleridge  on,  86 ;  drove  abroad 
in  a  dung-cart, 95  ;  Jeffrey  on,  144, 
145  ;  not  a  stranger  to  the  mys- 
tic's rapture,  358  n. ;  identifies 
Nature  with  the  lot  of  man,  545. 
Wuthering  Heights,  Bronte,  267. 

Yeasi,  Kingsley,  297. 
Yonge,  Charlotte,  504. 

Zelie,   J.   S.,    Our   Denominational 
Paradoxes  quoted,  151. 


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